In a story published last week in the Boston Globe, Carolyn Johnson covered one of the quiet crises facing scientific research today: the fact that .

But talk to a scientist long enough, and youll probably hear a story like this: An intriguing new discovery was reported in a research journal, wrote Carolyn Johnson in an excellent article on this topic in the Boston Globe. Maybe it was a biologist describing a new Achilles heel in cancer cells, a psychologists profound insight into human behavior, or an astronomers finding about the first moments of the universe. The scientist read about the finding and tried to confirm it in her own lab, but the experiment just didnt come out the same.

Although in some instances the cause of this is outright fraud, far more often the causes are more proasic and mundane. Not being able to replicate an experiment may just mean there was something wrong with the instruments in the initial experiment. (This quite famously happened to the OPERA collaboration, when they infamously announced that they had measured neutrinos moving faster than light. After attempts to reproduce the experiment failed, it was later revealed that the measurements had been erroneous due to a bad data connection in their instruments.)

Sometimes, though, the reason why an experiment doesnt work is because important steps were left out of the original paper, making it impossible for other scientists to replicate the experiment. Sometimes this is oversight, and sometimes its just that a particular lab has common practices that dont carryover to the wider community. In these cases, the experimenters didnt find a false result its just hard for other people to demonstrate the same thing.

Journal of Visualized Experiments founder Moshe Pritsker (Credit: JoVE)

This particular aspect of day to day aspect of scientific research was deeply frustrating to Dr. Moshe Pritsker when he was engaged in research a towards his PhD a little over a decade ago. He would find himself unable to complete experiments working just off papers, but when he was able to meet with an experimenter or visit their lab, he was able to then replicate the experiment. But this experience made him frustrated about the way science was being done in the 21st century.

Why doesnt it work? he told me. Its text. Its not good for transfer of knowledge about complex experiments. When you see people do it, youll get small details you cant get from text.

Faced with the time consuming process of visiting original labs to see how experiments were performed led Pritsker to thinking that there had to be a better way for scientists to share information than the centuries-old process of publishing papers.

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