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  The email that arrived in Richard Young’s inbox in October 2013 was polite but firm. The writer was part of a group of researchers who “are conducting a study to investigate the reproducibility of recent research findings in cancer biology.” A paper that Young had published in Cell in 2012 on how a protein called c-Myc spurs tumor growth was among 50 high-impact papers chosen for scrutiny by the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology. The group might need help with materials and advice on experimental design, the message said. Young wrote back that a European lab had already published a replication of his study. No matter, the project’s representative replied, they still wanted to repeat it. But they needed more information about the protocol. After weeks of emails back and forth and scrambling by graduate students and postdocs to spell out procedures in intricate detail, the group clarified that they did not want to replicate the 30 or so experiments in the Cell paper, but just four described in a single key figure.

    This past January, the cancer reproducibility project published its protocol for replicating the experiments, and the waiting began for Young to see whether his work will hold up in their hands. He says that if the project does match his results, it will be unsurprising—the paper’s findings have already been reproduced. If it doesn’t, a lack of expertise in the replicating lab may be responsible. Either way, the project seems a waste of time, Young says. “I am a huge fan of reproducibility. But this mechanism is not the way to test it.”

    That is a typical reaction from investigators whose work is being scrutinized by the cancer reproducibility project, an ambitious, open-science effort to test whether key findings in Science, Nature, Cell, and other top journals can be reproduced by independent labs. Almost every scientist targeted by the project who spoke with Science agrees that studies in cancer biology, as in many other fields, too often turn out to be irreproducible, for reasons such as problematic reagents and the fickleness of biological systems. But few feel comfortable with this particular effort, which plans to announce its findings in coming months. Their reactions range from annoyance to anxiety to outrage. Cancer geneticist Todd Golub of the Broad Institute in Cambridge has a paper on the group’s list. But he is “concerned about a single group using scientists without deep expertise to reproduce decades of complicated, nuanced experiments.”

     Golub and others worry that if the cancer reproducibility project announces that many of the 50 studies failed its test, individual reputations will be damaged and public support for biomedical research undermined. “I really hope that these people are aware of how much responsibility they have,'' says cancer biologist Lars Zender of the University of Tübingen in Germany. Timothy Errington, the reproducibility effort’s manager at the nonprofit Center for Open Science in Charlottesville. Virginia, knows the scrutiny has unsettled the community. But, he says, the project is working hard to make sure that the labs have all the details they need to match the original studies. The effort will ultimately benefit the field, he says, by gauging the extent of the reproducibility problem in cancer biology.

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