To promote reproducibility in scientific research, eLife is committed to implementing Research Resource Identifiers, encouraging authors to capture an unambiguous description of the research resources within their articles.
Resources used in experimental work are often insufficiently described, which creates a barrier to replicating the results. That is why we have endorsed the Resource Identification Initiative (#RII), a community-led project that originated from the FORCE11 group, which aims to improve reproducibility in biomedical and life sciences through the use of stable and unique Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) for authenticating key research resources.
RRIDs must be machine-readable, free to generate and access, and consistent across publishers and journals.
We are now encouraging authors to include RRIDs within the Materials and methods section of their papers to help identify model organisms (or cell lines), antibodies, and tools.
Here are some example RRIDs:
· Antibody: RRID:AB_2178887
· Model organism: RRID:MGI:3840442
· Cell line: RRID:CVCL_1H60
· Tools: RRID:SCR_007358
The RRID Portal lists existing RRIDs and instructions for creating a new one if an RRID matching the resource does not already exist.
So far, the authors of two eLife articles have listed RRIDs of the resources they used. Leroy et al. included RRIDs in their paper discussing how early intrinsic hyperexcitability does not contribute to motoneuron degeneration in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Held et al. also included RRIDs in their recent paper on the function of ELKS proteins in relation to excitatory synapses.
