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What is ScienceCheck?
ScienceCheck is simply a website for researchers to share feedback on the effectiveness of published experimental methods. Our motto is Sharing Better Science: Critical evaluations of published experimental methods.
The concept is simple: researchers fill out a simple survey about the reproducibility and utility of the literature method(s) which they have worked with, and these survey results are organized into a database which can be searched easily via our web-based interface. Additionally, users have the option to provide more complete details about their experiments, and other users can follow-up with comments and questions.
The main purpose of ScienceCheck.org is to capture and share much of these unreported experimental results related to the scientific and technical literature. Why waste time and money making the same mistakes dozens of others have made trying to use an unreliable or less-than-general method? Why not share your good fortune in successfully utilizing a published method with the greater research community?
ScienceCheck is only focused on collecting evaluations from researchers who have actually used (or attempted to use) a published method or protocol (a set of instructions, such as an experimental procedure, which can be reproduced by someone skilled in the relevant art).
The focus is exclusively on the effectiveness of these methods, and not on e.g. the general scientific merits of various publications, of which these methods may comprise only a small part. The method may or may not be the focus of the publication; in fact, published methods are often tools taken or modified from other publications which are required for the published study.
Why participate?
It only takes a few moments of your time—and the collective benefits to our community are huge! Our streamlined process allows you to quickly post an evaluation of the method that you have worked with, and our search engines enable you to quickly find evaluations of methods from specific publications, authors, or subject areas.
Our goal is to foster a research and development world where people spend more time trying things that will work, and less time trying methods that are likely to disappoint. Our motto for making this happen is “Sharing Better Science”. Like many others, we believe that a more open and accountable research community will be a happier, more productive community. And we believe that ScienceCheck is one important tool to help make this happen.
But in order to proceed, we need a bit of help. To become a forum useful to the broader R&D community, ScienceCheck needs to reach a critical mass. We need to populate our database with as many evaluations of literature methods as possible, and then maintain a steady stream of new evaluations to keep the forum relevant to as broad an audience as possible. We’re asking people who are passionate about their research to submit as few or as many evaluations as they are able. We can assure you that we will make every effort to help to make your contributions benefit as many people as possible.
We’d also love to hear from you if you’d like to become more deeply involved in our mission of “Sharing Better Science”. As our site grows, we will be looking for editors/moderators of different subject areas to help ensure that our evaluations are of the highest quality. We are also always open to feedback and ideas from individuals on how to improve the site and how to promote ScienceCheck to help it reach a critical mass. Check out our blog at http://sciencecheck.wordpress.com/, and also feel free to contact us directly at feedback@sciencecheck.org.
Who can participate?
- Anyone who uses published experimental methods, for example in research journals or patents.
- We also welcome feedback from those who supervise researchers using specific experimental methods, e.g. research professors and engineers.
- We welcome evaluations from most any research and development area, including: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, General Engineering, and Medicine.
- Anyone can search our database of evaluations free of charge; submitting evaluations and commenting on them requires a very brief and free registration.
What will be the cost?
- ScienceCheck is free for all users.
- We plan to recoup our development and operating costs by selling sponsorships, and eventually by selling relevant, targeted advertising for the site.
How does it work?
See our Help section for instructions, or Take a Tour, but the site is simple and intuitive enough that most people can use it without any special instruction.
Who is behind ScienceCheck?
Founder: Chris Dockendorff, Ph.D
Chris conceived and designed ScienceCheck in his spare time over a period of several years, after numerous discussions with friends and colleagues convinced him that there was an urgent unmet need for a forum for researchers worldwide to share their specific experiences with published experimental methods. Chris is a full-time synthetic and medicinal chemist who has developed valuable chemical methods and discovered potent compounds useful for the study of cancer, pain modulation, and ion channel function during his time at the University of Toronto, University of Texas at Austin, and the Broad Institute.
Lead Developer: Steven Parkes, Ph.D
Steven Parkes is an independent software developer in Palo Alto, California. He has been involved in concurrent object oriented programming for many years. He currently specializes in reslient design for distributed backend systems. He is the primary developer of the Dramatis actor framework and contributes widely to open source projects focused around Ruby, Python, Javascript, and Linux.
Director of Community Development: Cristina Fernandez
Cristina is a full time research chemist at the Broad Institute. She is helping to build communities of researchers in different subject areas who will benefit by participating in ScienceCheck. Cristina has a B.A. (Chemistry) from Harvard University, and has performed research in diverse areas including vascular biology, asymmetric catalysis, and malaria drug discovery. She has a strong interest in promoting open science and innovative collaboration strategies for scientists. In her free time, she has volunteered as a writer for the Harvard Science Review, and has organized charity efforts for Raices de Esperanza (Roots of Hope).
Advisor: Gary Geisler, Ph.D
Gary Geisler, Ph.D. is a faculty member in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches and conducts research in the areas of digital libraries, digital multimedia, and human-computer interaction. He is currently primary- or co-investigator on several federally funded grant projects, including the Open Video Digital Library Toolkit, an open source software product for easily creating Web-based digital video libraries, and eMicrobes, a digital library for learning infectious diseases. Gary is also an active consultant specializing in the design and development of online information systems, with past and current projects funded by the Library of Congress, the National Science Foundation, Emerson College, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation, and the National Science Digital Library.
Acknowledgements
Moses Hohman, Ph. D (Collaborative Drug Discovery)
Moses and Collaborative Drug Discovery helped greatly to manage the technical development for our first release of ScienceCheck, which has been no small undertaking, despite the apparent simplicity of the site. We also thank Dr. Barry Bunin (CDD) for helping to facilitate the technical side of our project after less-than-satisfactory work with a few other developers.
Our partners at Worry Free Labs (formerly Iterative Media) have performed the bulk of our graphic design work, based on our original designs.
White Lion provided us with some nice initial graphic design work which was used for our first ScienceCheck demo.
Pivotal Labs provides us with Pivotal Tracker, free project management software which we highly recommend.
We also thank the numerous volunteers who have provided us with feedback and helped us out with testing prior to our launch, but in particular we would like to thank the following people for their valuable input: Ivan Jewett, Bhushan Hole, Seth Alexander, Noah Benjamin, Jamie McQuay, Suvi Simila, Amal Ting, Jason Dockendorff, and Christine Picard.