In the digital age, the collaborative and often community-governed effort of scholarly research has gone global and unlocked unprecedented potential to improve our understanding and quality of life. That is, if we let it. Publishers continue to monopolize access to life-saving research and increase the burden on researchers through article processing charges and a pyramid of volunteer labor . This exploitation makes a mockery of open inquiry and the denial of access as a serious human rights issue .
I vividly remember the first experiment I conducted for my PhD in economics, investigating the conditions under which trust forms between strangers. I had built a solid theoretical framework, designed the experiment - in which students played a trust game - carefully, and optimistically named my database 'AwesomeData'. But when I ran my first sessions, the results made no sense. My participants weren't behaving as theory - or even common sense - would suggest, because my set-up made the task too confusing.
The Metascience Alliance is a coalition of more than 25 funders, academic groups, companies and other institutions that pursue metascience: the use of scientific methods to understand and improve science itself.