Define reproducible, in the terms of the precise actions that people take. Is it reproducible if the same scientist repeats the experiment in the same lab and gets the same results? Because that's the current bar of reproducibility, and that 89% that is not "reproducible" certainly passed that bar.

What was being tested was a different lab, with different materials, trying to get the "same" results, for some definition of same. If you give 100 programmers an algorithms book, and tell them to produce code for a binary search, and only 25% of the programmers are able to make something that works, does that mean that binary search is only 25% reproducible?

If five different companies benchmark five different web frameworks for their application, and come to 2-4 different answers about which one is the 'best,' does that mean that the benchmarks are not reproducible? Of course not.

What's being highlighted here in this study is the extreme diversity of biological models. And one doesn't necessarily expect exact reproducibility in other people's hands, because we simply don't have technology to characterize every single aspect of a biological model, and it's impossible sometimes to even recreate the exact same biological context. Is something "reproducible" if it means that it replicates in 5% of other cell lines, 25% of other cell lines?