Reproducibility and Repeatability in Ecology

The quantitative synthesis of research results is of fundamental importance in seeking to develop ecological generalities and construct refutable theories. It is thus critical that published studies contain sufficient detail to allow their methods to be replicated and their results compared. In response to this need, growing attention is being paid to the publication and presentation of analytical results in ecology. Our recent experience has been that journal referees (and editors) increasingly express the opinion that results need to be accompanied by general access to the primary data on which they are based. Here we argue that the legitimate aims of formal scientific inquiry (including the publication and validation of results) do not need to infringe the intellectual property rights of publishing ecologists. It is widely agreed that modern scientific inference relies on the vulnerability to refutation of its general theories, which have the characteristic quality of being both testable and falsifiable (Popper 1968). In a scientific discipline such as ecology, the search for general rules and laws is greatly hampered by a high degree of historically based, context-specific contingency. Progress toward such principles will thus be best served by the ability to repeat potentially important discoveries across different ecological systems (Gurevitch et al. 2001, Koricheva 2003).