SciCrunch announces Luxembourg collaboration

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The Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg is partnering with SciCrunch.

The LCSB will be one of the first academic institutions to use SciScore – an automated validation tool for scientific articles – as part of its internal quality control process. It will contribute to further enhance the rigour and reproducibility of the publications written by LCSB’s researchers.

Scientific research always faces new challenges and, with the increasing volume of data, the complexity of new tools and the fast pace of modern science, ensuring that experiments can be repeated and results validated is as crucial as ever. Over the past years, the scientific community has widely acknowledged that the reproducibility crisis needs to be addressed in order to guarantee trust in the published literature and best use of valuable resources.

Early on, the LCSB recognised reproducibility as a very important topic and decided to tackle the issue by implementing measures to promote research quality. Grouped under the umbrella of the Responsible and Reproducible Research (R3) initiative, they include state-of-the-art IT infrastructures, GDPR compliant data processes and tools for high-quality scientific computing code. 'A particular emphasis has been placed on a standardised publication workflow which will now be complemented through the development of a pre-publication check, said Dr Christophe Trefois, leader of the R3 team.

This internal verification is aimed at monitoring the compliance with the latest standards and high-quality of all manuscripts written at the LCSB, through a series of checks addressing issues such as plagiarism, data protection and source code quality. SciScore, through its rigor check, will be one of the main components in this pre-publication pipeline.

'Part of the recent research is not reproducible due to flaws in reference material, unreliable source identification, and similar issues, explained Anita Bandrowski, founder and CEO of SciCrunch, the company behind SciScore. 'Our solution helps flag these issues before scientific articles become part of the permanent record.