Data_Sheet_1_Baby’s Online Live Database: An Open Platform for Developmental Science.docx

Efficient data collection in developmental studies is facing challenges due to the decreased birth rates in many regions, reproducibility problems in psychology research, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we propose a novel platform for online developmental science research, the Baby’s Online Live Database (BOLD), which extends the scope of the accessible participant pool, simplifies its management, and enables participant recruitment for longitudinal studies. Through BOLD, researchers can conduct online recruitment of participants preregistered to BOLD simply by specifying their attributes, such as gender and age, and direct the participants to dedicated webpages for each study. Moreover, BOLD handles participant recruitment and reward payment, thereby freeing researchers from the labor of participant management. BOLD also allows researchers the opportunity to access data that were collected from participants in previous research studies. This enables researchers to carry out longitudinal analyses at a relatively low cost. To make BOLD widely accessible, a consortium was formed within the Japan Society of Baby Science, where members from diverse research groups discussed the blueprint of this system. Once in full-scaled operation, BOLD is expected to serve as a platform for various types of online studies and facilitate international collaboration among developmental scientists in the near future.

在发育研究领域，高效的数据收集面临诸多挑战，诸如众多地区出生率的下降、心理学研究中的可重复性问题，以及COVID-19疫情的冲击。为此，我们提出了一种创新的在线发育科学研究平台——婴儿在线直播数据库（BOLD），该平台拓展了可参与人群的范围，简化了其管理流程，并能够为纵向研究招募参与者。通过BOLD，研究者可以仅通过指定参与者的属性，如性别和年龄，便能够对已预先注册于BOLD的参与者进行在线招募，并将他们引导至针对每个研究的专属网页。此外，BOLD负责参与者的招募和奖励支付，从而解放研究者从参与者管理中的劳动负担。BOLD还允许研究者访问先前研究中收集的参与者数据，这使得研究者能够在相对较低的成本下进行纵向分析。为了使BOLD得以广泛普及，日本婴儿科学会在内成立了联盟，来自不同研究小组的成员共同讨论了该系统的蓝图。一旦全面运营，BOLD有望成为多种在线研究平台的支撑，并在不久的将来促进发育科学家之间的国际合作。