“Reproducibility” means the ability of a study to be duplicated, either by the same researcher or by someone else. It is said to be one of the cornerstones of rigorous research and is important across various disciplines, such as social science and biomedical research. For reproducibility to be possible, it is important for authors to provide enough information about their methods when their research is published, so that others are able to get the same results if desired. In this editorial, editors representing more than 30 biomedical journals ask for more reproducible results, especially for pre-clinical trial research. These recommendations have implications for animals used as research subjects.

The recommended guidelines include more transparency for animal experiments, such as “reporting the source, species, strain, sex, age, husbandry, inbred and strain characteristics, or transgenic animals, etc.” If it is made publicly available, this information could be useful for animal advocacy purposes. However, the entire concept of “reproducibility” in biomedical research may encourage additional testing on animals, at least in the short term. In the longer term, advocates will obviously hope that there is less reliance on animal testing and animal models.