Towards minimum reporting standards for life scientists

Transparency in reporting benefits scientific communication on many levels. While specific needs and expectations vary across fields, the effective use of research findings relies on the availability of core information about research materials, data, and analysis. In December 2017, a working group of journal editors and experts in reproducibility convened to create the “minimum standards” working group. This working group aims to devise a set of minimum expectations that journals could ask their authors to meet, and will draw from the collective experience of journals implementing a range of different approaches designed to enhance reporting and reproducibility (e.g. STAR Methods), existing life science checklists (e.g. the Nature Research reporting summary), and the results of recent meta-research studying the efficacy of such interventions (e.g. Macleod et al. 2017; Han et al. 2017).