title: The Resource Identification Initiative: A cultural shift in publishing.
abstract: A central tenet in support of research reproducibility is the ability to uniquely identify research resources, i.e., reagents, tools, and materials that are used to perform experiments. However, current reporting practices for research resources are insufficient to allow humans and algorithms to identify the exact resources that are reported or answer basic questions such as "What other studies used resource X?" To address this issue, the Resource Identification Initiative was launched as a pilot project to improve the reporting standards for research resources in the methods sections of papers and thereby improve identifiability and reproducibility. The pilot engaged over 25 biomedical journal editors from most major publishers, as well as scientists and funding officials. Authors were asked to include Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) in their manuscripts prior to publication for three resource types: antibodies, model organisms, and tools (including software and databases). RRIDs represent accession numbers assigned by an authoritative database, e.g., the model organism databases, for each type of resource. To make it easier for authors to obtain RRIDs, resources were aggregated from the appropriate databases and their RRIDs made available in a central web portal ( www.scicrunch.org/resources). RRIDs meet three key criteria: they are machine readable, free to generate and access, and are consistent across publishers and journals. The pilot was launched in February of 2014 and over 300 papers have appeared that report RRIDs. The number of journals participating has expanded from the original 25 to more than 40. Here, we present an overview of the pilot project and its outcomes to date. We show that authors are generally accurate in performing the task of identifying resources and supportive of the goals of the project. We also show that identifiability of the resources pre- and post-pilot showed a dramatic improvement for all three resource types, suggesting that the project has had a significant impact on reproducibility relating to research resources.
authors.affiliation: Center for Research in Biological Systems, UCSD, la Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
authors.forename: Anita
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bandrowski
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, OHSU, Portland, Oregon, 97239, USA.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brush
authors.affiliation: Center for Research in Biological Systems, UCSD, la Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffery S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Grethe
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, OHSU, Portland, Oregon, 97239, USA.
authors.forename: Melissa A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Haendel
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, 01605, USA.
authors.forename: David N
authors.initials: DN
authors.lastname: Kennedy
authors.affiliation: Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, 171 77, Sweden.
authors.forename: Sean
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hill
authors.affiliation: Fishberg Department of Neuroscience and Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Patrick R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Hof
authors.affiliation: Center for Research in Biological Systems, UCSD, la Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
authors.forename: Maryann E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Martone
authors.affiliation: Scientific Outreach, Faculty of 1000 Ltd, London, W1T 4LB, UK.
authors.forename: Maaike
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pols
authors.affiliation: John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 07030, USA.
authors.forename: Serena
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tan
authors.affiliation: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
authors.forename: Nicole
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Washington
authors.affiliation: Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1043 NX, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Zudilova-Seinstra
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, OHSU, Portland, Oregon, 97239, USA.
authors.forename: Nicole
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Vasilevsky
keywords: Multi-centre initiative; Post-pilot data; Pre-pilot data; Publishing; Resource identifiers