LAUSR

Transparency in reporting benefits scientific communication on many levels. While specific needs and expectations vary across fields, the effective interpretation and use of research findings relies on the availability of core information about research materials, study design, data, and experimental and analytical methods. For preclinical research, transparency in reporting is a key focus in response to concerns of replication failure. The inconsistent reporting of key elements of experimental and analytical design, alongside ambiguous description of reagents and lack of access to underlying data and code, has been shown to impair replication (1) and raise doubt about the robustness of results (2, 3). In response to early concerns about replication of published results, funders, publishers, and other stakeholders have called for improvements in reporting transparency (4–7). Several initiatives ensued, including journal policies and joint efforts by journals, funders, and other stakeholders (8–10). One of these initiatives, the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines (11), outlines a policy framework at the journal level that over 1,000 journals and publishers have adopted. The National Academies have focused on reproducibility and replicability* challenges through several recent initiatives leading to consensus reports, including Reproducibility and Replicability in Science (12), Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research (13), and Fostering Integrity in Research (14). Each of these reports concludes that lack of reporting transparency is one factor which contributes to these systemic problems. Building on these findings, the National Academies convened a public workshop in September 2019 titled “Enhancing Scientific Reproducibility in Biomedical Research Through Transparent Reporting.” The workshop was designed to discuss the current state of transparency in reporting biomedical research and to explore the possibility of improving the harmonization of guidelines across journals and funding agencies. During this workshop, we provided a preliminary description of our MDAR initiative, the Materials Design Analysis Reporting Framework (15). Our MDAR working group came together in late 2017 with the intention to develop a policy framework to promote transparent reporting that would support article-level application of the principles of the TOP guidelines, with a focus on implementation through journal policies and editorial practice. Our goal was to develop a framework and an implementation support system that would be practically applicable for a broad range of journals in the life sciences. In many ways, the MDAR Framework is a joint iteration on our collective previous experience with guidelines, checklists, and editorial requirements, toward a harmonized and practical guideline for minimum reporting requirements. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) workshop provided a valuable opportunity for broader consultation across relevant stakeholder groups (16). We incorporated the feedback we received at the workshop, and here we report the results of our project in the form of three main MDAR outputs: the MDAR Framework, which forms