Key Resources, according to the National Institutes of Health, are things that can work differently from lab to lab and protocol to protocol (NOT-OD-16-011). These key resources; specifically: antibodies, transgenic organisms, cell lines and specialty chemicals; are some of the most likely culprits of variability in experiments, therefore contributing to irreproducibility in biological experiments. The National Institutes have asked that investigators include a plan for how these resources will be ‘authenticated’ to ensure, at a minimum, that they are what they say they are. The problem with Key Resources is not only that they may be faulty, but in 2013, Vasilevsky and colleagues showed that in 50% of published scientific papers, these resources are not ‘findable’. This means that authors do not report sufficient detail to even allow human readers to identify these highly variable resources. Research Resource IDentifiers, RRIDs, are stable unique identifiers, that can be included in the methods section of research papers. RRIDs are currently used to identify the cell line, antibody, transgenic organism or software tool used in the study (Bandrowski et al., 2015; Bandrowski & Martone, 2016) and they have been adopted by over 100 journals as a matter of publishing best practice, i.e., they are in the instructions to authors, and have appeared in over 1000 journals. Including RRIDs in a paper, makes the resources more findable, in fact when Vasilevsky looked at the papers that contained RRIDs, using the same criteria as were used in the 2013 paper, more than 90% of resources were identifiable and therefore findable (Bandrowski et al., 2015). RRIDs were created to introduce a standardized and machine-friendly syntax for reporting on resource use so that it would be easy not only to identify the exact resource used, but to make it possible to find all studies that used a particular research resource. RRIDs are becoming accepted in the scientific literature, especially in some fields such as neuroscience, where many of the top journals currently enforce the RRID standard (e.g., Cell, Nature, Science). The number of papers published with RRIDs continues to grow, and several ACS titles do contain RRIDs, though no instructions to authors currently specify this as a requirement.

Research resource identifiers, RRIDs, for key resources, making your paper FAIR

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.