Why Volunteer Science?

The ubiquity of internet-connected devices represents an opportunity for disrupting the way behavioral research is done. Traditional behavioral research requires physical space and dedicated personnel and is often limited to recruiting a small number of locally available subjects. Online studies can be run anywhere with anyone at any time, require only server space, and can facilitate a practically endless number of participants at a given time.

Volunteer Science is a platform for creating online labs. Individual researchers can create unlimited online studies and recruit unlimited participants from anywhere around the world. Research labs can create research teams, giving all their members access to lab experiments and data. Large research organizations like universities, government agencies, and private companies can provide their research teams with organization-specific behavioral lab facilities connecting to internal- and external-facing audiences and subject pools.

How does it work?

Volunteer Science provides software for developing, testing, and hosting a study. Researchers can create their own studies using our library of study templates, extensive API, and the array of JavaScript libraries for online research like D3 and jsPsych. Once the study is created, researchers can post the study to their modern-looking lab page, where participants can see what the study is about, who is conducting the study, and other studies they may participate in. Researchers can also recruit participants from sites like Mechanical Turk and Prolific and build their own panel of participants. Once data has been collected, researchers can download the data for analysis.

Researchers on a research team can share study code with on another, build their own templates, and tap into a shared subject pool. Organizations can monitor and provision researchers with their own study management and publishing facilities, implement organization-wide standards and templates for research, and develop an organizational subject-pools for the organization.