ScienceCheck now open to the public!

I’m happy to say that ScienceCheck.org is now open to the public, and it can be used freely without invitation. It will be very exciting to watch our community of users grow, and I’m looking forward to people benefiting from our efforts to Share Better Science. We’re already working on some great new additions to the site that will be very informative and will hopefully encourage lots of participation. I’ll present some of these plans in more detail in future posts.

This is a good opportunity for me to thank a number of important people for their support in helping us get to our first (and biggest) milestone:

Gary Geisler: Gary is a professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Gary helped me to evaluate a number of the web developers that we hired for ScienceCheck. He is also volunteering as an advisor for the site, and his input has been very helpful for us.

Barry Bunin: Barry is CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery. He helped to facilitate the recruitment of our head developer, Steven Parkes, and connected us as well with Moses Hohman, who did a very nice job of managing the technical development for our first release of ScienceCheck.

Ivan Jewett, Bhushan Hole, Seth Alexander, Noah Benjamin, Jamie McQuay, Suvi Simila, Amal Ting, Jason Dockendorff, and Christine Picard. These folks provided me with lots of feedback and testing over the past 3 years. I am very grateful for your help!

Welcome!

Welcome to the ScienceCheck blog. We’ll be occasionally presenting some issues for discussion here related to our new forum ScienceCheck.org, which collects and presents evaluations from researchers on the effectiveness of published methods (typically experimental protocols). One of the main themes I will be dealing with here is the challenge of performing Open Science– how can we convince researchers to share successes and failures for the benefit of the greater community? There is clearly a wealth of untapped experimental wisdom (which typically goes unpublished) that we could all benefit from, and ScienceCheck.org serves to capture some of this wisdom and present it in an organized, searchable manner. In order to achieve this objective, it will be helpful to have your feedback and advice on a variety of issues–hopefully our occasional posts will inspire you to contribute something about your experience in R&D and how a forum like ScienceCheck could be useful. If we’re really fortunate, we might even convince you to become a real advocate of our Open Science approach by volunteering your help to publicize our cause, act as a subject editor, or help to create and test new features for the site.

Feel free to respond to the posts here or at our sister blog scdevelop.wordpress.com, which is focused on the site itself and collects feedback on specific features, plans, and technical issues. You are also welcome to contact me anytime at chris@sciencecheck.org.

Thanks for your interest and I look forward to hearing from you!

Chris