Scientists need to ask “uncomfortable questions” about the value of their own research and potentially give up their line of inquiry to work on larger, group-run projects to help address science’s reproducibility crisis, an influential voice on research integrity has argued.

Daniel Lakens is an experimental psychologist at Eindhoven University of Technology and was involved in the groundbreaking Open Science Collaboration project in 2015, which found that just 40 per cent of 100 leading psychology experiments were replicable.

He told a conference organised by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam that science had been “busy making incremental changes” to improve reproducibility in scientific research but “had not really fixed the core of why these problems emerge”.

“But the fixes are of such a level that the requirements [needed] are highly likely to make us uncomfortable as scientists,” explained Dr Lakens at the online event on 25 August. He added that these fixes “will change the way we do science and require us to give up certain freedoms” as researchers.

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