[Excerpts taken from the article, “A journal club to fix science” by Amy Orben, published in Nature]

“If science had generations, mine would not be defined by war or Woodstock, but by reproducibility and open science….Early-career researchers do not need to wait passively for coveted improvements. We can create communities and push for bottom-up change. ReproducibiliTea is one way to do this.”

“Sam Parsons, Sophia Crüwell and I (all trainees) started this grass-roots journal club in early 2018, at the experimental-psychology department at the University of Oxford, UK. We hoped to promote a stronger open-science community and more prominent conversations about reproducibility. The initiative soon spread, and is now active at more than 27 universities in 8 countries.”

“During each meeting, a scientific paper lays the groundwork for a conversation. Concerns vary from field to field and institution to institution, so each club focuses on aspects of scientific methods and systems that concern them most. Topics for my group ranged from discussions on replicability (Open Science Collaboration Science 349, aac4716; 2015), to debates about open-access publishing (J. P. Tennant et al. F1000 Res. 5, 632; 2016), the problems of analytical flexibility (J. P. Simmons et al. Psychol. Sci. 22, 1359–1366; 2011) and the potential of Registered Reports, a publication format in which papers are reviewed primarily on the research question and protocol, before results are known (C. D. Chambers Cortex 49, 609–610; 2013).”

“To launch their own ReproducibiliTea group, motivated researchers need only to select some articles and set a time and a place. No minimum group size or meeting frequency is required. They will then join a community of ReproducibiliTea journal clubs that continually discuss improvements and support each other. (For more information, see https://reproducibilitea.org/.)”

To read the article, click here.