In 2011, Brian Nosek, a psychologist from the University of Virginia, persuaded 270 of his peers to repeat 100 published psychological experiments to see if they could get the same results a second time around.

This initiative, the Reproducibility Project, was the first large systematic attempt to answer the question that has been perplexing psychologists for years: what proportion of results in their field are reliable?

Nosek was concerned that science had a tendency towards generating, novel, attention grabbing, but often unreliable findings.

The incentives to produce positive results were so tempting, that some scientists were simply locking their inconvenient data away.

He and a graduate student developed an online system that would allow researchers to keep a public log of the experiments they were running, where they could register their hypotheses, methods, workflows, and data as they worked. 

That way, it would be harder for them to go back and cherry-pick their best data after the fact – and easier for other researchers to come in and replicate the experiment later.

Funders stayed away from the project until, in 2012, The Arnold Foundation came to the rescue. Together with Nosek, it co-founded the Center for Open Science in 2013 with $5.25 million in seed money.

In August 2015, Nosek revealed its results. His army of volunteers could verify the findings of only about 40 percent of the studies.

Media reports declared the field of psychology, if not all of science, to be in a state of crisis. It became one of the biggest science stories of the year.

For more information

wired.com/2017/01/john-arnold-waging-war-on-bad-science

philanthropydaily.com/young-billionaire-john-arnold-is-waging-war-on-bad-science