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Demonstrations of reproducibility are not reproducibility

Nature Ecology & Evolution (2026)Cite this article

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Replicability and reproducibility are core tenets of science as they inform the reliability, robustness and generality of results. Given their importance, journals have set forth measures that aim to promote them. We argue that many recent measures have been adopted rapidly with little justification, fail to achieve these aims, have costs for scientists and possibly undermine efforts towards replicability and reproducibility.

Over a decade ago, mandatory data archiving began to be implemented in several journals in ecology and evolution1. Mandatory data archiving provides clear benefits, including facilitating reproducibility and promoting assessment of replicability via meta-analysis, making raw data available for other uses, and allowing detection of rare instances of fraud. The past several years have seen many journals take additional measures in the name of reproducibility and replicability. These measures, in their extreme, have aimed to achieve the mandatory archiving of code that runs on any computer2, with detailed metadata files and other requirements that have progressed to a state in which computational reproducibility should be verifiable by a non-expert with the click of a mouse, and without having to even read the original paper (Supplementary Table 1).

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Fig. 1: Levels of replicability and reproducibility.

References

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Rowe, J. Stinchcombe, I. Moodie, D. Wilkinson, A. Sánchez-Tójar and S. Georganos for comments on the manuscript. S.P.D.L. is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR 2024-04599), Formas (2021-01096) and KK-stiftelsen (SFSG-2024).

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  1. Department of Environmental and Life Sciences, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

    Miguel Gómez-Llano & Stephen P. De Lisle

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  1. Miguel Gómez-Llano
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  2. Stephen P. De Lisle
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Correspondence to Miguel Gómez-Llano.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary text 1. Supplementary table 1.

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Gómez-Llano, M., De Lisle, S.P. Demonstrations of reproducibility are not reproducibility. Nat Ecol Evol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03000-w

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