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As the world has battled the COVID-19 pandemic over the past few months, the scientific community has seen a shift towards prioritizing research into this disease. A key reason this research has been able to progress so rapidly is scientific sharing. Already we’ve seen articles about COVID-19 on preprint servers and in journals, and researchers have been making new materials like plasmids available to scientists around the world. To support this pace of research, new, centralized databases and centers to support the sharing of materials and data associated with COVID-19 research have rapidly been developed.

We asked the individuals behind some of these new platforms what their motivations were for developing these resources and why they value scientific sharing as the scientific community strives to understand COVID-19. While the specific motivations vary, everyone we spoke with sees sharing and collaboration as the best way that the scientific community can make progress towards understanding this disease.

One thing many scientists enjoy is discussion of current new and exciting literature. As I transitioned out of academia and away from the bench I certainly had concerns that I may not have time to stay current or enjoy that discussion. Luckily, one needn't worry if they choose to move away from academic science; there is most likely abundant opportunity to continue such discussions. Beyond the excitement of learning about new cutting edge science, researchers of all varieties must stay current with literature and emerging technologies to remain competitive and relevant.

Enter: the journal club. 

This post was contributed by David Mellor from the Center for Open Science.

In the last decade, researchers have brought issues in reproducible research to the forefront in the so-called “reproducibility crisis.” Results in preclinical, biomedical and psychological sciences were called into question after credible attempts to replicate major findings could not be replicated by other researchers.There is both theoretical and empirical evidence (in psychology, cancer biology, pre-clinical life science work, economics) that published research is difficult to replicate. 

This post was contributed by Deborah Sweet, Vice President of Editorial at Cell Press.

Almost everyone who works in a lab struggles with reproducibility at some point.

Usually it comes up when a researcher decides on a new project and begins by trying to reproduce someone else’s result. Then, they hit trouble. The experiment won’t work. Even if it does, they don’t get the same result. So, then they end up investing time that they thought would be moving forward instead trying just to get going. It’s like being stuck in jail in Monopoly—you keep rolling the dice and not moving while all your friends are racing around the board. Eventually, you get lucky and manage to escape, but you’ve lost a lot of time.

From the perspective of an author submitting a paper, the peer-review seems like another dragon to slay on the way to publish your work in a scientific journal. The peer-review is a service that we, as scientists, provide for journal editors to help decide whether work is suitable for publication in their journal. The early peer-review attempts took place at the beginning of the 18th century. Yet the peer-review was not widely adopted by the scientific community until the mid-20th century, and many iconic papers, including the ones on the structure of the DNA, were not peer-reviewed (Baldwin, 2015).