Go forth and replicate!

WORLD VIEW China must back up its plan for soil quality with legislation p.375 DISCO FEVER Fluorescent rodents light up organ analyses p.376 NORTH FACE Alaskan skull fossil is a new species of river dolphin p.377 To make replication studies more useful, researchers must make more of them, funders must encourage them and journals must publish them. be expected to curate all replication attempts of papers they publish, although they should support technology that aggregates and disseminates that information. And they should be open to publishing in-depth replication attempts for original papers. For example, Scientific Reports encourages critique by offering to waive its article-processing charge for a peer-reviewed refutation of an article published in the journal. Increased visibility would raise the value of a replication attempt, but also increase the risk of retaliation against replicators. There is little reward for taking that risk. A published replication currently does little to raise the esteem of the replicator with hiring committees or grant reviewers. This creates a chicken–egg problem — researchers don't want to conduct and publish rigorous replication studies because they are not valued, and replication studies are not valued because few are published. Commendably, funders such as the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in the United States and the Neth-erlands Organisation for Scientific Research are explicitly supporting replication studies, and setting high expectations for publication. Scientists can help to ensure that such studies are valued by citing them and by discussing them on social media. Conventions around replication studies are in their infancy — even the vocabulary is inadequate. Editors who coordinate RRRs strive to avoid loaded labels such as 'successful' and 'failed' replications. The Reproducibility Initiative, a project to help labs coordinate independent replications of their own work, also shied away from similar pronouncements after its first study. A paper is a jumble of context, experiments, results, analysis and informed speculation. Outcomes can depend on apparently trivial differences in methods, such as how vigorously reagents are mixed, as one collaboration painstakingly discovered (W. C. Hines et al. Cell Rep. 6, 779–781; 2014). Neither are there conventions for interactions between replicators and the original authors. Some original authors have refused to share data or methodological details. In other cases, some replicators broadcast their attempts without first trying to resolve inconsistencies, a practice that leaves them more open to charges of incompetence. (Thankfully, both replicators and original authors are now backing …