Retracing Steps

Sage Bionetworks aims to show that transparency and sharing are key to ensuring research reproducibility.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articl...tracing-Steps/

..."A growing body of research has highlighted scientists’ inability to reproduce one another’s results, including a 2012 study that found only 11 percent of “landmark” cancer studies investigated could be independently confirmed. This dismally low reproducibility figure is estimated to be even lower for large-scale studies because outside reviewers are often stymied by a lack of detailed protocols and access the resources needed to perform the analyses...

..." Seattle-based Sage Bionetworks is taking a different approach—one that “makes reproducibility a byproduct of the research process itself, rather than simply a burden at time of publication,” said [/B]Stephen Friend, the organization’s co-founder, director, and president.[/B]

Sage’s solution? An open-source computational platform, called Synapse, which enables seamless collaboration among geographically dispersed scientific teams—providing them with the tools to share data, source code, and analysis methods on specific research projects or on any of the 10,000 datasets in the organization’s massive data corpus. Key to these collaborations are tools embedded in Synapse that allow for everything from data “freezing” and versioning ...