Grassroots Rigor: making rigorous research practices accessible, meaningful, and building a community around them

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Project Summary: Throughout biomedical research, progress is impeded due to a lack of rigor, which could be ameliorated with better training and with community buy-in. While many papers have been written and countless presentations delivered on rigorous practices, the average scientist fails to consistently follow the relevant principles. We structure our proposal based on three insights. (1) Adoption of the principles of rigorous science is a question of culture, which can only be changed by a broad community effort. This work requires buy-in from all stakeholders, including students, professors, and other champions of rigor. (2) To enable this cultural change, materials must be engaging, high quality, and inspiring for learners. Above all, these materials need to serve the community; they must be available for direct consumption, for incorporation into teaching by many professors, and their structure should be a template for research itself. (3) The development and rollout of such high-quality materials necessitates a tight feedback loop with the community; by evaluating their use, we can see how these materials actually influence scientific rigor. The grass-roots, community-driven movement toward a more rigor-infused scientific culture that we envision requires excellent and visually engaging materials with the following key features: learning by doing, short lectures, open languages, easy delivery mechanism, adaptable content, simple interfaces, group-based learning, open-source bidirectional collaboration with the community, and thoroughly evaluated. Our main goal is to enable the principles underlying scientific rigor to become part of everyday culture in science.