> Maybe the format needs to change. Perhaps journals should require video, audio commentary or automated note taking for publication.
A 'world view' column in Nature suggested the same things last week [1]; the author described a paper of theirs [2]:
> Yes, visual evidence can be faked, but a few simple safeguards should be enough to prevent that. Take a typical experiment in my field: using a tank of flowing water to expose fish to environmental perturbations and looking for shifts in behaviour. It is trivial to set up a camera, and equally simple to begin each recorded exposure with a note that details, for example, the trial number and treatment history of the organism. (Think of how film directors use clapper boards to keep records of the sequence of numerous takes.) This simple measure would make it much more difficult to fabricate data and ‘assign’ animals to desired treatment groups after the results are known.
I thought some journals were now allowed video archives. Some of the most famous experiments, such as the Stanley Milgram studies, have excellent video documentation (and in the case of Milgram, it's been replicated all around the world .. although no it's not ethical to do so).
Most experiments run for years (literally) and no one is going to record or archive, let alone watch, years of footage to confirm that one paper is legit.
A brief experiment showing the apparatus and the collection of a few data points might be helpful for understanding the paper, but I can't see using it to verify a non-trivial experiment.
For those that study human subjects, releasing video's of the subject is not going to happen any time soon. Participants have rights, and anomyity is an important one.
Blur their faces? Some experiments might depend on seeing faces, but not all. Plus, you would at least have video of everything the experimenters do, if not the results.
A 'world view' column in Nature suggested the same things last week [1]; the author described a paper of theirs [2]:
> Yes, visual evidence can be faked, but a few simple safeguards should be enough to prevent that. Take a typical experiment in my field: using a tank of flowing water to expose fish to environmental perturbations and looking for shifts in behaviour. It is trivial to set up a camera, and equally simple to begin each recorded exposure with a note that details, for example, the trial number and treatment history of the organism. (Think of how film directors use clapper boards to keep records of the sequence of numerous takes.) This simple measure would make it much more difficult to fabricate data and ‘assign’ animals to desired treatment groups after the results are known.
[1]: http://www.nature.com/news/science-lies-and-video-taped-expe... [2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.12668/f...