When making decisions about funding and jobs the scientific community should recognise that most of the tools used to evaluate scientific excellence are biased in favour of established disciplines and against interdisciplinary research.

It is time for the research community to rethink how the outputs of scientific research are evaluated and, as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment makes clear, this should involve replacing the journal impact factor with a broad range of more meaningful approaches.

Recent advances in technology now make it possible to carry out biomedical research on animals living in the wild, or captive animals living in naturalistic conditions.

A EASAC working group on gain-of-function research has emphasised the importance of ensuring that the necessary safeguards and policies are in place.

In the first study attempting to formally quantify the deleterious impact of research misconduct on funding sources and publication output, we found that misconduct accounts for a small but substantial portion of American biomedical science funding dollars and damages the productivity and rate of funding acquisition of those who commit misconduct.

Science hackathons can help academics, particularly those in the early stage of their careers, to build collaborations and write research proposals.

The RIPOSTE framework has been developed to support early and regular discussions between scientists and statisticians in order to improve the design, conduct and analysis of laboratory studies.

A simulation study is used to demonstrate how mistakes in identifying the experimental unit and the unit of analysis can lead to incorrect analyses and inappropriate inferences when reporting research studies.

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology will generate a high-quality dataset to explore questions about the reproducibility of research, and will make all data, analysis and other research materials openly available to the research community.

William R Bishai, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV (K-RITH), argues that the best place to carry out research into a disease is in its midst.