When we started the Community for Rigor in 2022, the mandate was clear: create a curriculum to help scientists at all levels of their career learn, teach, and promote scientific rigor while bringing together people from all over the world who are interested in doing more reliable and transparent science. That sense of community has been as important as the rigor curriculum from the get-go, and our upcoming C4R25 Conference – the only conference focused entirely on rigor – is both a celebration and a catalyst for this community.
What began in 2022 as an internal meeting for the C4R team, where we gathered for three days to work on learning objectives, curriculum content, and planning, has now become, for the first time, a public forum for rigor enthusiasts and optimists who believe in science and our capacity to continue improving it.
This year, from September 8 to 10 in Philadelphia, we’ll host the first public version of the C4R Conference. While we’ll still reserve the final day for internal C4R team work, the rest of the conference will be open to anybody interested in demystifying rigor, sharing ideas, and connecting with experts in the field.
On Monday, September 8, we’ll kick off the conference with a panel at UPenn about future proofing your research with rigor. It’s no secret that scientific paper retractions have been on the rise in the last 20 years, and that science in general is facing many challenges. This session aims to help us understand rigor as the best tool to conduct solid and transparent science that can stand the test of time, and the toughest -and very welcome!- scrutiny of our peers.
For this session, we’re thrilled to have speakers like Ivan Oransky, founder of Retraction Watch, a global watchdog and searchable archive that uncovers retractions, exposes misconduct, and celebrates transparency in science. And Anita Bandrowski, a neurophysiologist-turned-informatics pioneer who co-founded and leads the RRID initiative—championing unique, persistent identifiers for biological research resources to dramatically boost reproducibility, transparency, and rigor in science. Moderating the talk will be Jason Williams, C4R advisor and Assistant Director at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DNA Learning Center, where he develops national biology education programs.They’re a dream team when it comes to discussing rigor, reproducibility, and transparency in science.
Tuesday, September 9 will be packed with learning experiences and live collaborations on rigor topics, workshops of our units-in-the-making, and opportunities for meaningful connections. A fireside chat with science heavyweights, Carl Bergstrom and René Vidal, will spark the inevitable conversation about the responsible use of LLM’s in research, giving us a taste of what’s to come in one of C4R’s units about this timely and crucial topic.
Careers in science are not limited to the lab or the classroom, so we’ve invited Mariah Hoye, Program Manager at NIH/NINDS Office of Research Quality, and Thomas Zhang, President of UPenn’s Biomedical Graduate Students Association (BGSA) to discuss Mariah’s exemplary career in a lightning talk designed to help grad students understand alternative paths related to scientific rigor.
To close the public program with a bang, our P.I., Konrad Kording, will lead a demo of his latest creation, the Scientific Project Planner app, a tool he developed to complement C4R’s work and help researchers properly and thoroughly plan their experiments. In Konrad’s own words, “a lot of folks start out by collecting data and then hope that, in the end, everything comes together into a nice paper—which, arguably, makes for both ugly papers and non-rigorous science.”
The C4R25 Conference is more than an event—it’s a shared space to reimagine how science is done, taught, and shared. Whether you’re a student just starting out, a seasoned researcher, or simply someone who believes that science can always be better, we invite you to be part of this conversation. Come to Philadelphia this September ready to learn, challenge ideas, swap stories, and leave with new tools—and new friends—for building research with lasting impact. After all, rigor isn’t just a standard we uphold; it’s a culture we create together.
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