Abstract
Science has always been self-correcting. Through traditional approaches such as establishing benchmarks and standards, and reproducing, replicating, or generalizing prior research results, work that is at the same time important and suspect will be subjected to further testing. With science now becoming simultaneously critically important to society and an expensive enterprise, I argue that we need to adopt an enterprise-wide approach to self-correction that is built into the design of science. Principles of such an approach include educating students to perform and document reproducible research, sharing information openly, validating work in new ways that matter, creating tools to make self-correction easy and natural, and fundamentally shifting the culture of science to honor rigor.
Highlights
All citizens intrinsically are interested in scientific results, as they matter to our health, security, safety, economic prosperity, and quality of life
In the current age of the multimillion-dollar science experiment, I would even argue that we, as scientists, have an obligation to use all of the transparency and openness tools at our disposal to make the self-correcting process of science proceed as quickly and efficiently as possible so that we are excellent stewards of precious resources. One corollary of this hypothesis is that as the research enterprise becomes ever more open, even more replication failures will be uncovered, and even more harm will be done to the trustworthiness of science unless efforts to bolster the rigor of experimental protocols and eliminate bias from interpretations are successful
The report from the National Academies has laid out a roadmap for a holistic approach to achieve that “self-correction by design” that I called for in the introduction to this perspective
Summary
All citizens intrinsically are interested in scientific results, as they matter to our health, security, safety, economic prosperity, and quality of life. In the current age of megascience, the need to build quality assurance into the scientific method from its inception is even more critical. In this perspective, I recall from my background in geophysics the various quality control methods that have served science well in past decades, and how they must be institutionalized and formalized into the culture of all disciplines of science. Science has always been self-correcting, but in the past the self-correction was left to chance. We need a scientific enterprise with self-correction more intentionally designed into the system
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