Publishers are redoubling their commitment to transparency and reproducibility — but they can’t bring about change alone.

In 2013, Nature began asking the authors of life-sciences papers to provide extra information in a bid to tackle the pressing problem of poor reproducibility in research. According to one survey of Nature authors conducted in 2016–17, 86% of respondents considered poor reproducibility to be a growing challenge in the life sciences.

Researchers in these fields are now asked to use a structured reporting summary for their manuscript submissions. Among other things, the checklist requires authors to state whether their experimental findings have been replicated; how they determined an appropriate sample size; whether they randomized samples; and whether data have been assessed by researchers who did not know which group they were assessing.

Such a checklist, which is provided to peer reviewers and published with each life-sciences paper, has helped to improve transparency in the reporting of research^1,2. But editors from many journals and researchers recognize that there is still work to be done.

In 2017, a group met to discuss how such a systematic approach to transparency and reproducibility could be improved and adopted across more journals. The result is the MDAR (Materials Design Analysis Reporting) Framework, which has just been published3.