Essay of: A manifiesto for reproducible science
Jhon Stivenson Pabón∗
MATHEMATICAL MODEL I, group A2, year 2022.
Professor: PhD. Fabio Lora Clavijo
Universidad Industrial de Santander
Bucaramanga. Colombia
(Dated: February 7, 2024)
Science must in principle be reproducible and self-
correcting itself. If these fail, the evolutionary process
of science will be affected and a setback will be
damaged or the formation process will be slowed down.
The activity of science has been inherent to human
identity, highlighting its character of innovation,
training, guiding the path that technology must follow,
of which we are not its creators but its offspring, and
those who exercise it have the ethical duty to keep it
under the behavior of ideal practices in practices that
facilitate the transmission of knowledge highlighting its
reproducibility.
Regarding the factors that affect the reproducibility
of science, it has been classified as a crisis, and various
problematic factors [1] are evidenced in the articles.
Where the veracity of these is questioned for various
reasons. However, measures can be used to prevent
science from stalling or heading down wrong paths that
would undoubtedly set it back.
The concept of selecting enabling or fitting data
for models is a practice known as data skimming or
P-hacking. Since, although statistics in its predictive
power is powerful, it is also dangerous if algorithms are
overused, which can lead to effects such as seeing noise
structures.
To this is added that we tend to find patterns or
believe that we see them typical of human behavior
called apophenia. This is the problem of low predictive
power and bias in the data.
There is also a debatable conflict of interest, such
as bias based on competitiveness, given that when
authors reject articles in which they are peers, this
is a practice that delays the publication of results
and unethical competition. Although, competitiveness
must be a driver of results where authors of the same
specific topic do not delay each other, but also generate
international collaboration. Being this a solution that
∗ Correspondence email address: jhon2228082@correo.uis.edu.co
addresses several problems: bias, conflict of interest,
low power of statistical analysis, and the union of
driving power of science.
In addition, I highlight a practice of academic entities
that have become a large business at the expense of
publishing articles in which authors are charged for
publishing, subscribing, and downloading articles. This
has generated competition between journals, giving
facilities to some of them, which leads to increasing the
publication capacity of a journal. Being the journals
with high attractive metrics for researchers driven by a
status factor.
This competition has generated more accessible
journals dedicated to publications that increase volume
but lack contributions. Being the registry of novelties,
and not every novelty in science is publishable, it may
not necessarily be of interest. This has increased the
number of articles in volume but not in quality, which
leads to a slow amount of academic literature that will
stall the process of science. The role that journals [2]
must address in reproducibility and in adopting prac-
tices such as asking authors for corrections to measures
that errors are reported or, where appropriate, the
elimination of the article, is noteworthy.
Practice measures to ensure reproducible science
should be adopted by all involved, from the author to
the journals. Of these practices I will highlight a model
worth reviewing for its ethical aspects: the year the
2018 Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry Frances Arnold
retracted the publication of an article because she had
inconsistencies. This is a reproducible science practice
and evidences a failure of journals and researchers in
an effort to publish in the absence of truth.
Also for highlighting that reproducibility is not the
only practice that should be focused on, but also that
it be free, both in open access journals, in codes, and
data. All this, as a whole, offers any researcher the
ability to obtain not only accessibility but also the
option of reproducing previous and recent articles.
The example set by the large Hadron collider CERN
is highlighted, which adopts free science measures,
publications in Arxiv, and the generation of codes [3].
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All thinking about the accessibility that the researcher
must have to advances, facilitates all reproducibility.
Finally, the central idea of this essay is highlighted:
Science has a reproducible fundamental character,
[1] Munafò, M., Nosek, B., Bishop, D. et al. A manifiesto
for reproducible science. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0021 (2017).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0021
[2] Allison, D., Brown, A., George, B. et al. Reproducibil-
which must be self-contained. That it does not depend
on the authors in force but on a line of authors in his-
tory guiding the advances in a correct practice of repro-
ducibility, if any link in this process fails, there will be
a break at some point in time and this line of advances
will be affected.
ity: A tragedy of errors. Nature 530, 27–29 (2016).
https://doi.org/10.1038/530027a
[3] Chen, X., Dallmeier-Tiessen, S., Dasler, R. et al.
Open is not enough. Nature Phys 15, 113–119 (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0342-2