It seems clear that characteristics of research such as transparency in method and findings, and acknowledging and handling factors that might confound those findings, are common concerns related to rigour in many – if not all – research fields. In this webinar, speakers from arts practice, astronomy, psychology, and qualitative social sciences outlined their perspectives on these questions, with the aim of highlighting both diversity and perhaps surprising commonalities.

To coincide with Make it Public week, the Health Research Authority's (HRA) Make it Public group ran a free online workshop, which aimed to bring together stakeholders in the research sector to explore themes in research registration, with a focus on how we can raise registration rates together. The workshop was part of the HRA's Make it Public strategy to make clinical research more transparent and accessible. 

We headed to Alzheimer's Research UK Conference in Liverpool for a special session during Day 1 on how to make your research as credible as possible. Speakers included: Prof Selina Wray, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology; Dr Michael Ashby, University of Bristol and BNA Trustee for Credibility in Neuroscience; Dr Kaitlyn Hair, University of Edinburgh; Lewis Hotchkiss, University of Swansea

This meeting initiated an interdisciplinary dialogue exploring the epistemological and pragmatic dimensions of preregistration, identifying potential limits of application, and developing a practical agenda to guide future research and optimise implementation. It was organised by Dr Tom Hardwicke, Professor Marcus Munafò, Dr Sophia Crüwell, former CAB member Professor Dorothy Bishop, and Professor Eric-Jan Wagenmakers.

In this webinar, UKRIO explored how researchers and institutions view open research, what motivates them to practice open research (including the steps that they take) and what barriers or challenges they face when considering or implementing open research.

This online course on programming with R enabled researchers to develop their data skills and make their analyses & figures more reproducible. This course was led by researcher Dr Collette Taylor, and Dr Jenny Wilshaw, an Applied Data Scientist and Software Developer, both based at the Royal Veterinary College. 

The GW4 Alliance (the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter) hosted their inaugural GW4 Open Research Week under the theme 'Theory of Change' which explored how to make research more accessible, transparent, reproducible, visible and of value to the public.

The Open Research Week featured a range of online, hybrid and in-person events - plus a GW4 Open Research Prize and Early Career Publishing Prize.

Reproducible research means getting the same results consistently, every time you run an analysis of the same data. In this webinar HDRUK discussed the practical steps you can take, using simple and impactful practices, in order to make your research reproducible, including a number of aspects of research data management.

OS Fair 2023 brought together and empowered open science communities and services; to identify common practices related to open science; to see what are the best synergies to deliver and operate services that work for many; and to bring experiences from all around the world and learn from each other to suggest ways on how communities can work together to produce roadmaps for the implementation of Open Science.

These 9 events over 4 days covered many aspects of open research, including publishing in data journals, promoting open research in smaller institutions, measuring openness, reward and recognition. This also looked at the future of open research, with an opening keynote from Dr Ross Mounce, Director of Open Access at the Arcadia Fund and a closing keynote from Ashley Farley Programme Officer The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2023, we turned the focus of our Credibility Lunchbox series to neuroimaging. This set of short webinars provided neuroscience researchers working in a neuroimaging setting with practical tips on strengthening credibility at different stages of the research project. This series was hosted by Cassandra Gould Van Praag from the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging.

Roni Tibon, University of Nottingham
"Preregistration in neuroimaging"

Cyril Pernet, Copenhagen University Hospital

"Data privacy for neuroimaging"

Etienne Roesch, University of Reading

"Research Data Management in neuroimaging"

Watch again in the recordings section, or as a playlist on YouTube.

Two of the areas we focus on in the BNA's Credibility in Neuroscience manifesto are to change research culture within the neuroscience sector and the wider research environment so that credible research practices become more recognised. With this in mind, this webinar demonstrated changes that are already happening at individual, institutional and funder level to shift research culture, and allowed attendees working in neuroscience to ask further questions to our speakers. 

Our panel of speakers, chaired by Ana Dorrego-Rivas included:

• Emily Farran, Professor in Developmental Psychology and Academic Lead Research Culture and Integrity at the University of Surrey
• Rosa Sancho, Head of Research at Alzheimer's Research UK
• Sepideh Keshavarzi, Senior Research Fellow at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Professor Brian Nosek, co-founder of the Center for Open Sciences, received an honorary degree from the University of Bristol in November. During his visit, Brian was part of a panel for this UKRN event and reflect on sustaining meaningful openness and transparency in research. 

This interactive introduction to R workshop provided attendees with the necessary skills to get started with data inspection, analysis, and visualization in R, hosted online by researcher and R expert Dr. Joscelin Rocha Hidalgo with RIOT Science members.

This event provided a comprehensive overview of the current policy initiatives, research assessment reforms, and financial measures that support the transition to Open Science, and looked forward at new trends. 

This one-day event showcased examples, share knowledge and use cases where reproducible analytical pipelines have been developed, with a particular focus on the challenges teams have faced and how to resolve them, and gave opportunities for questions and advice on specific use cases.

This meeting brought together an international audience of researchers motivated to improve the robustness of scientific research. It included important stakeholder groups such as data and services providers, tool developers, publishers, institutions and funders that are developing policies relating to research reproducibility.

The overarching theme of the 2022 conference was to position the challenge of reproducibility and replicability as a behaviour-change problem that, when addressed, can lead to culture change within research. 

This set of short webinars adds to our in vivo series providing neuroscience with practical tips on strengthening credibility at different stages of the research project. Each webinar was hosted by advisory board member Emily Sena.

Ulrich Dirnagl, QUEST Center for Responsible Research
"Preregistering your in vivo studies"

Kaitlyn Hair, University of Edinburgh
"Handling data in your in vivo studies"

Matt Grubb, KCL
"Sharing data from your in vivo studies"

Watch again in our recordings section. 

Dorothy Bishop retired in 2022 and this special two-day scientific meeting showcased research inspired by Dorothy's contributions. The meeting focused on two major themes: language development and disorder, from neurobiology through to intervention, and reproducibility and open science. 

Dorothy was a key founding member of our Credibility Advisory Board. The BNA provided support to enable postgraduate students and ECRs to attend this Festschrift. 

Building on our Credibility in Neuroscience in vivo toolkit, this series of short webinars provided neuroscience researchers working in an in vivo setting with tips on how to improve the credibility of their work. Each webinar was hosted by advisory board member Emily Sena.

Esther Pearl, NC3Rs

"Improving reliability through design and reporting"

Natasha Karp, AstraZeneca 

"Embracing variation to boost reproducibility"

Nadia Soliman, Imperial College London

"How evidence synthesis can boost in vivo credibility"

Watch again in our recordings section. 

An increase in the complexity and scale of biological data means biologists are increasingly required to develop the data skills needed to design reproducible workflows for the simulation, collection, organisation, processing, analysis and presentation of data. Developing such data skills requires at least some coding, also known as scripting. This makes your work (everything you do with your raw data) explicitly described, totally transparent and completely reproducible. However, learning to code can be a daunting prospect for many biologists. 

This course was aimed at researchers at all stages of their careers interested in experimenting with R to make their analyses and figures more reproducible. The BNA held a workshop on using R at BNA2021, which is available online. 

It is well known that not all aspects of publishing research are as transparent and robust as they should be. There are many risks associated with bias, self-plagairism, peer review, p-hacking, HARKing, authorship disputes, image manupulation and many other questionable publication practices that raise queries about the integrity of the research and researchers. In recent years the focus on reproducibility and the need for open research practices are driving new methods of publishing which the speakers explored in this webinar.

Science is in the midst of a reproducibility crisis: more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments, according to one Nature survey.

In response to this crisis, many funders and publishers globally have introduced new guidelines to safeguard the reproducibility of research. Join this webcast to learn tricks and techniques, from three expert speakers, to better produce reliable research.

More information about the speakers, full details, and on demand access can be found on the event website.

In April 2021, in partnership with the UK Dementia Research Institute, the BNA hosted its fifth Festival of Neuroscience. This online event brought together multiple organisations with an interest in brain research at a single, shared event. 

We held a number of events and activities related to Credibility in Neuroscience, including:

• a workshop on using R 
• a session with the 2021 Credibility Prize winners
• a panel discussion on Journal Impact Factor

Building on our Credibility in Neuroscience in vitro toolkit, this series of three short webinars provides neuroscience researchers working in an in vitro setting with tips on how to improve the credibility of their work. Each webinar is hosted by advisory board member Madeline Lancaster.

Selina Wray, University College London, 8 July 2021

"Reproducible research using stem cell derived neurons and organoids"

Iva Kelava, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, 15 July 2021

"How we can make 3D models more reproducible"

Clare Jones, Talisman Therapeutics, 22 July 2021

"Human stem cell models of neurodegeneration: complex, relevant and robust"

View the webinar series on our recordings page

In this seminar, Lizzie Gadd (founder of the Bibliomagician blog) discussed responsible metrics, in general, and recent policy changes by UK funders and what that means for the sector. Robin Banerjee  also talked about the specific work being carried out by University of Sussex and how they are practically implementing their DORA action plan.

This series of online seminars looked at the challenges involved in achieving reproducibility in research. The seminars aimed to identify best practices that can help to overcome central challenges around reproducibility, and to convey several concrete guidelines that can help researchers during their attempts to make their own research transparent and verifiable. The seminars also showcased concrete experiences gained during various case studies. 

Tackling research culture and the drivers for behaviour is a key part of making neuroscience as credible as possible. Wellcome's ongoing programme is looking at how it can improve research culture towards one that is creative, inclusive and honest. This online festival brought together advocates and experts from across the research community to consider practical steps that Wellcome and others can take, with a mix of online written and verbal content, and live discussion sessions. 

Reproducibility for Everyone (R4E) is a global, community-led reproducibility education initiative that since 2018 has demonstrated reproducible tools and methods. 

This workshopintroduced reproducible workflows and a range of tools along the themes of organisation, documentation, analysis, and dissemination. 

ReproducibiliTea is a grassroots journal club initiative that helps researchers create local Open Science journal clubs at their universities to discuss diverse issues, papers and ideas about improving science, reproducibility and the Open Science movement.  

In this meeting, Dr Lonni Besançon (Université Paris Sud) presented a paper, 'Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams'. 

Institutional hiring policies that value reproducibility, Open Science, and other factors which support credibility of research, are an important part to improving the research environment researchers operate in. 

This online event, chaired by Advisory Board member Dorothy Bishop, outlined ways in which researchers and institutions have already improved their hiring practices, and discussed what is still missing, setting up a future blueprint for improving research and research culture through hiring and promotion.

The BNA’s ‘Building Bridges Between: Industry and academia’ initiative aims to foster collaboration between neuroscientists in industry and academia through events and networking opportunities.

This panel discussion and Q&A considered the need for credible research as a means of ensuring public trust in science. The online meeting was chaired by Dr Kevin Cox (Trustee of the BNA and Chairman of Biorelate), with speakers Dr Jina Swartz (Executive Medical Director and the Therapeutic Area Head at MSD) and Dr Sheuli Porkess (Executive Director, Research, Medical and Innovation at the ABPI).

The 2nd meeting of the ORWG discussed developments in Open Research, including on publishing, training, and the Research Excellence Framework. The online meeting was hosted by local organisers Rik Henson, Amy Orben and Alessandro Tomassini.

This meeting was sponsored by the MRC CBU Open Science Committee, British Neuroscience Association and F1000.

The talks from the day are available to rewatch via the BNA's YouTube channel. 

In this online webinar, attendees heard about how you can improve the credibility of your neuroscience research through how you report your findings, with speakers providing their thoughts on some of the different ways to help improve reporting of research - from pre-registration posters to registered reports.

Speakers: Johan Carlin (University of Cambridge), Guillaume Rousselet (University of Glasgow), and Rik Henson (University of Cambridge). 

Rewatch the webinar in full, or download the slides, from our recordings page. 

The BNA teamed up with the Brainbox Initiative to look at some of the potential benefits and opportunities that the adoption of open science techniques can offer neuroscience researchers in the future.

This virtual symposium aimed to promote and establish open science in non-invasive brain stimulation and neuroimaging by sharing current practices, results of pre-registered experiments and the future of open science.

Speaker: Emily Sena (University of Edinburgh)

In this special event, attendees of the FENS 2020 Virtual Forum heard about credibility initiatives that have the potential to increase the reproducibility, replicability, and reliability neuroscience research, which will not only benefit scientific progress in the long-run, but also address a major cause for the poor mental health of research.

Speakers: Rik Henson (University of Cambridge), Dorothy Bishop (University of Oxford), Ben Bleasdale (Wellcome), Tanita Casci (University of Glasgow), Peter Stern (Science)

While there are a number of solutions that can be implemented by individual researchers, there are wider issues, for example around skills training and incentives, that require cultural change. In this talk, attendees were given an overview of some practical solutions such as open science and good research practices that can help make our research findings more robust. 

Speaker: Verena Heise (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg)

Rewatch the talk in full, or download the slides, from our recordings page. 

The need for robust research is more important than ever. How much do you know or understand about credible, open and reproducible scientific practices? This webinar gave attendees from industry an introduction to the BNA's credibility in neuroscience work with a focus on how it is relevant for in vivo studies, and how attendees could improve current practice to produce more robust science.

Speaker: Anthony Isles (Cardiff University)

Rewatch the talk in full here (requires free registration)

Are reproducibility and REF incompatible enemies? Or best friends? This lunchtime Q&A event, chaired by Prof Rik Henson, gave fellows and senior academics the opportunity to discuss the compatibility of open science, reproducibility and publication practices.

Speakers: Professor Marcus Munafò (UK Reproducibility Network), and Dr Helena Mills (Research England).