The newly funded Horizon Europe project CATALYST will change research culture to help reform 15 departments into "catalysers" of reproducible research, then cascade effective measures that foster culture change to as many as possible across Europe.

Reproducibility is widely recognised as a cornerstone of research quality across disciplines, and reproducibility practices (RPs) are essential for enhancing the transparency and credibility of research results. Horizon Europe and related initiatives have funded a significant number of policies, tools, interventions, networks/communities, and infrastructures designed to improve research practices and foster reproducibility. However, as many researchers are lacking awareness of how to conduct their work in a way that ensures more reproducible results, adoption of RP’s remains poor.

Fostering sustainable change towards increased reproducibility requires normalising RPs and embedding them into everyday practice. And that is one of the main problems. This everyday practice is not used to RPs and has limited knowledge of how to foster and implement reproducibility. To achieve this, this requires culture change in every day practice, CATALYST (Culture as a CATALYST for Achieving Lasting Reproducibility in Science) addresses these issues by targeting departments and research teams in Research Performing Organisations, which play an important role in maintaining and changing research culture.

A key component of CATALYST is that it builds on interventions already proven effective in previous EU projects, including TIER2, OSIRIS, iRISE and TRUSTparency, and deploys them across 15 Catalysers. The Catalysers are 15 departments across Europe, spanning three epistemic domains: Biomedicine, Computer Science/AI, and Social Sciences and Humanities. They are chosen to represent CATALYST’s core target by implementing reproducibility interventions in their everyday work, adapting the interventions to their needs, and extending the adoption of these interventions through their networks. Once interventions have been validated by the Catalysers, they will be rolled out to 45-70 cascade sites across Europe and beyond, three to five per Catalyser, identified through the Catalysers' own communities and through CATALYST's multiplier networks. This ensures that culture change towards using RPs permeates the European research landscape within and beyond the project's lifetime.

CATALYST is a 42-month Coordination and Support Action that started on 1 September 2026. The project is coordinated by Joeri Tijdink, project coordinator, and Rita Santos, project manager, at the coordinating institution Amsterdam UMC. It brings together 15 partners from 14 countries, with associated partners in Canada and Indonesia. The project is supported by a core team of work package leaders representing partner institutions across Europe, including the University of Coimbra, the University of Bristol, the University of Oslo, the Know Center, and Pensoft Publishers.

Stay updated on CATALYST news by following the project on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

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This project receives funding from the European Union (Grant Agreement ID:101292942). Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.