Better Welfare, Better Science: Animal Care as a Driver of Reproducibility in Behavioral Neuroscience
A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Animal Welfare".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 November 2026 | Viewed by 63
Special Issue Editor
Interests: ultrasonic; vocalization; communication; behavioral neuroscience; animal welfare; husbandry; seizure; development; experimental reproducibility
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In recent years, experimental reproducibility in behavioural neuroscience has received increasing attention, with growing recognition that uncontrolled environmental and procedural variables can substantially influence behavioural outcomes. At the same time, laboratory animal welfare has become a major focus of refinement efforts, with researchers being encouraged to improve housing, handling, and testing conditions in order to meet evolving ethical and regulatory standards. These two developments are closely linked. Stress, anxiety, and other welfare-related factors are now understood to introduce significant biological variability, potentially acting as hidden confounding variables that contribute to inconsistent or non-reproducible results across laboratories.
This Special Issue aims to highlight emerging concepts and methodologies demonstrating that improving animal welfare can directly enhance experimental reliability and reproducibility in behavioural neuroscience. We seek contributions describing novel approaches to behavioural testing, housing, environmental control, and experimental design that reduce animal stress and anxiety, thereby improving both animal well-being and data quality. By identifying and eliminating welfare-related sources of variability, these approaches have the potential to address important aspects of the current reproducibility crisis while advancing best practices in animal research. The topic is well aligned with the journal’s scope, as it integrates behavioural neuroscience, experimental methodology, and animal welfare science, and we anticipate assembling a focused yet diverse collection of contributions addressing this timely and important issue.
In this Special Issue, original research articles, reviews, and methodological papers are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Effects of housing, handling, and environmental conditions on behavioural outcomes;
- Stress, anxiety, and affective state as sources of experimental variability;
- Refinement of behavioural testing paradigms to improve validity and reproducibility;
- Sensory environments (e.g., noise, light, vibration, and odour) as confounding variables;
- Welfare-driven improvements in experimental design and reporting;
- Standardisation versus refinement in behavioural neuroscience;
- Links between animal welfare, physiology, and behavioural data quality;
- Strategies to reduce inter-laboratory variability;
- Translational implications of improved welfare and experimental rigour;
- Ethical refinement as a tool for better science.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Paul B. Bernard
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- animal welfare
- experimental reproducibility
- confounding variables
- stress
- anxiety
- housing
- rodents
- husbandry
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