Behavioral science labs: How to solve the multi-user problem.

Abstract

When lab resources are shared among multiple research projects, issues such as experimental integrity, replicability, and data safety become important. Different research projects often need different software and settings that may well conflict with one another, and data collected for one project may not be safeguarded from exposure to researchers from other projects. In this paper we provide an infrastructure design and an open-source tool, labManager, that render multi-user lab facilities in the behavioral sciences accessible to research projects with widely varying needs. The solutions proposed ensure ease of management while simultaneously offering maximum flexibility by providing research projects with fully separated bare metal environments. This solution also ensures that collected data is kept separate, and compliant with relevant ethical standards and regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation. Furthermore, we discuss preconditions for running shared lab facilities and provide practical advice.