Looking at the EPSRC website I came across the following call for proposals involving collaboration between a US and UK programme:

http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/CallsForProposals/NSF-EPSRCChemistryProposals07.htm

Now, being an academic I’m up for any method of trying to get money out the system, especially special programmes. But is there an opportunity here to do something quite exciting in the area …

Yesterday afternoon the Open Notebook Science case studies session was held as part of the Scifoo lives on sessions at Nature Island, Second Life. Jean-Claude Bradley organised, moderated and spoke first followed by me and Jeremiah Faith. We all spoke about experiences and implementation of different approaches to open notebook science.

Jean-Claude has put the …

Research in most places today is done under more or less rigorous safety regimes. A general approach which I believe is fairly universal is that any action should in principle be ‘Risk Assessed’. For many everyday procedures such an assessment may not need to be written down but it is general practise in the …

In previous posts I have discussed the setup and rationale for how we are organising our blog-based electronic laboratory notebook. This has covered how the blog is actually organised. In this post I will look at the issue of how we actually view the blog and extract information.

The organisation of the blog with a …

I am continuing this in a new post rather than keeping mucking with the old one.

Currently I am working on reproducing the description of Exp098 from Jean-Claude Bradley’s UsefulChem Wiki within our blog based notebook to identify differences in practise. The reproduction can be found at;

http://chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/projects/blog/blogs.php/blog_id/15/

then click on ‘Usefulchem_exp098′ under the ‘Sandpit Group’ heading …

In a previous post I said I would try to replicate an experiment from the UsefulChem open Wiki notebook within our blog system to see how it might look. This post is to record what I am doing as I do it. Thus this is the lab book I am using to record the …

If it hasn’t been obvious from what has gone previously I am fairly new to the whole E-science world. I am definitely not in any form a computer scientists. I’m not a computer-phobe either but my skills are pretty limited. It’s therefore a little daunting to be going for the first time to an …

Well when it’s not open obviously.

There are many ways to provide all the information imagineable while still keeping things hidden. Or at least difficult to figure out or to find. The slogan ‘No insider information’ is useful because it provides a good benchmark to work towards. It is perhaps an ideal to attain rather …

Just a short note to say we will be doing a demonstration of the blog notebook at the UK E-science All Hands meeting being held in Nottingham in a few weeks time. We will be on the BBSRC stall at 13:40 on Wednesday 12th September assuming everyone else runs to schedule. If you are …

I wanted to pull out some of the comments Jean-Claude Bradley has made on the e-notebook posts and think them through in more detail.
Jean-Claude’s comment on this post:

There may be differences between fields but, in organic chemistry, we could not make a blog by itself work as an electronic notebook. The key problem was …