Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative receives international award

The Einstein Foundation, in cooperation with the BIH QUEST Center for Responsible Research, promotes an annual award to recognize efforts that strengthen research quality. This year, the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative is one of the winners.

Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative receives international award.

The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative

The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative was a multicenter project aimed at assessing replicability rates in Brazilian biomedical science. Launched in 2017 under the leadership of Prof. Olavo Amaral (UFRJ), the project brought together more than 200 researchers to carry out 143 replications of experiments published over the past two decades by scientists affiliated with Brazilian institutions. 

The project’s main findings were released as a preprint in March 2025, and the results are summarized here. The award recognizes the project’s impact beyond its empirical results, highlighting the opportunities it has created for improving current practices in academic research as well as the legacy it leaves for organizations such as BRISA and the Brazilian Reproducibility Network itself. 

Jürgen Zöllner, a member of the award jury, commented on the project’s selection: “The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative proves that a coordinated, nationwide effort to strengthen research rigor and reproducibility is possible—and should inspire disciplines and funders worldwide to follow suit.”

The project is in the final stages of results verification and is expected to release an updated preprint in the upcoming months. The €100,000 award will be dedicated to continuing efforts in support of reproducibility in Brazilian research, and the specific uses of the funds will be defined by the consortium. 

A premiação

The Einstein Foundation Berlin was founded in 2009 to support research in the state of Berlin, Germany. In 2017, the BIH QUEST Center—affiliated with the Charité university hospital, also located in Berlin—was created to develop and implement new practices to improve the quality and reliability of biomedical research. 

The international award recognizes individuals, institutions, and projects committed to enhancing research quality. In its first edition in 2021, it honored the contributions of Paul Ginsparg, founder of the arXiv repository; the Center for Open Science, a research and infrastructure institution for open science; and the ManyBabies 5 project, a multicenter initiative dedicated to building a more robust scientific foundation in developmental psychology. Other notable awardees include initiatives focused on the publication system, such as PubPeer, and reforms in researcher evaluation, such as the project led by Anne Gärtner.

In 2025, the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative received the award in the institutional category, alongside Simine Vazire (individual category) for her academic trajectory, and Maximilian Sprang (Early Career Researcher category) for the project Erring Rigorously. Additional information about this edition's award recipients, as well as those from previous years, can be found at https://award.einsteinfoundation.de/award-winners-finalists.