A STAR is Born, Indeed

News on the RRID front is encouraging!



We have been very busy adding new journals over the last year. It is wonderful whenever we see a new journal with and RRID, especially when the instructions to authors are updated and you know that this is a serious effort from the editors.

More recently RRIDs are being type-set into journals by groups such as BMC, eLife (structured methods), Elsevier and Cell Press journals improving the syntax of the identifiers and allowing journals to link to databases from articles if they chose to do so.

However a step further has just been undertaken by an entire journal group. Cell Press has just restructured their methods section to make it "STAR: Structured Transparent Accessible Reporting"-compliant. This of course includes RRIDs!

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2016.08.021

The idea is that authors create a list of research resources in a table helping to keep track of all the "ingredients one needs to replicate the study" and echoes the NIH language of Rigor and Transparency. This will be a real boon for reproducible science!

Some papers using the new format are already out from Cell:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286741631011X

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416309953

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416309321

We LOVE structured methods!