The Resource Identification Initiative: A Cultural Shift in Publishing

Area of Science:

• Biomedical research
• Scientific publishing
• Data management

Background:

• Research reproducibility relies on uniquely identifying experimental resources like reagents and tools.
• Current reporting practices are insufficient for precise resource identification and tracking across studies.
• Lack of clear resource identification hinders answering questions about resource usage in prior research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To pilot the Resource Identification Initiative (RII) for enhancing research resource reporting standards.
• To improve the identifiability of research resources and thereby bolster scientific reproducibility.
• To assess author adoption and impact of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) on resource identifiability.

Main Methods:

• Engaged over 25 biomedical journal editors, scientists, and funding officials.
• Piloted the use of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) for antibodies, model organisms, and tools (software/databases).
• Aggregated resources and their RRIDs into a central web portal for author accessibility.

Main Results:

• Over 300 articles published with RRIDs across 62 journals.
• Expanded journal participation from 25 to over 40.
• Authors demonstrated ability to identify resources and supported the project's goals.
• Significant improvement in resource identifiability observed for all three resource types.

Conclusions:

• The Resource Identification Initiative successfully improved the identifiability of research resources.
• RRIDs are machine-readable, free, and consistent across publishers, facilitating adoption.
• The pilot project indicates a positive impact on scientific reproducibility through better resource tracking.