The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a long-standing tradition of scholarship on core facility operations, best practices, and the import of cores for driving rigor and reproducibility. In September, several members of the ABRF Committee on Core Rigor and Reproducibility, including Dr. Patricia Basta, Director of the BioSpecimen Processing Facility, published a paper entitled “Optimizing Research Visibility: The Role of Investigators and Shared (Core) Research Resources in Publications Using RRIDs” in the Journal of Biomolecular Techniques. This article explores the factors that impact the acknowledgement of core facilities (or the lack thereof) in scholarly publications and discusses the value of permanent identifiers, like Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) in addressing some of those factors.
In October, Dr. Michelle Itano, Director of the Neuroscience Microscopy Core, and Kara Clissold, Associate Director in the Office of Research Technologies, published “How do you measure the success and impact of a core facility?” in Biotechniques. This paper discusses various Return on Investment (ROI) measures used to assess core facilities as well as the challenges and caveats in applying those same assessment strategies across core facilities with different operational parameters and the critical importance of ensuring core directors and their stakeholders have the tools necessary to use data to assess their core facility operations.
Congrats to all the authors on their publications!