Communications of the ACM
Drop That Beaker
Online Games and Remote Experiments Could Reduce Scientific Fraud
Credit: VMware
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon (CMU) and Stanford universities are promoting massive online laboratories, which use video games to engage large numbers of non-professional investigators and prevent scientists from manually testing their own hypotheses, as a way to combat the rising level of errors and fraud in life sciences research. The researchers say their online, game-like approach is more scientifically rigorous than the standard practice of scientists proposing an explanation for some phenomenon and then testing the hypothesis through experimentation.
The researchers believe massive online labs could be a model for all of science. Earlier this year, the researchers designed the EteRNA project, an online lab that has produced design insights that have advanced the knowledge of RNA. "If you strip away the game part, projects such as EteRNA present a fundamentally new model of remote science that can prevent many common forms of scientific fraud," says CMU professor Adrien Treuille.
The transparency of online labs makes it difficult for any individual to adjust scientific hypotheses to match experimental results, or to single out data to reflect a scientist's biases. "It's not typically acknowledged, but having the same team both develop a hypothesis and test it in the lab creates a conflict of interest — something that may be contributing to a plague of irreproducible results in many research studies," Treuille says.
From Carnegie Mellon University
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Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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