Regular readers will know I am a great believer in the potential of Web2.0 tools to enable rapid aggregation of loose networks of collaborators to solve a particular problem and the possibilities of using this approach to do science better, faster, and more efficiently. The reason why we haven’t had great successes on this thus far is fundamentally down to the size of the network we have in place and the bias in the expertise of that network towards specific areas. There is a strong bioinformatics/IT bias in the people …

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Following on from the discussion a few weeks back kicked off by Shirley at One Big Lab and continued here I’ve been thinking about how to actually turn what was a throwaway comment into reality:
What is being generated here is new science, and science isn’t paid for per se. The resources that generate science are supported by governments, charities, and industry but the actual production of science is not supported. The truly radical approach to this would be to turn the system on its head. Don’t …

One of the strong messages that came back from the workshop we held at the BioSysBio meeting was that protocols and standards of behaviour were something that people would appreciate having available. There are many potential issues that are raised by the idea of a ‘charter’ or ‘protocol’ for open science but these are definitely things that are worth talking about. I thought I would through a few ideas out and see where they go. There are some potentially serious contradictions to be worked through.

I am thinking about how to present the case for Open Science, Open Notebook Science, and Open Data at Science in the 21st Century, the meeting being organised by Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. I’ve put up a draft abstract and as you might guess from this I wanted to make an economic case that the waste of resources, both human and monetary is not something that is sustainable for the future. Here I want to rehearse that argument a bit further as …

Perimeter Institute by hungryhungrypixels (Picture found by Zemanta).
Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics are organising a conference called ‘Science in the 21st Century‘ which was inspired in part by SciBarCamp. I am honoured, and not a little daunted, to have been asked to speak considering the star studded line up of speakers including, well lots of really interesting people, read the list. The meeting looks to be a really interesting mix of science, tools, and how these interact with people (and scientists). I’m looking …

Following on from my post there has been lots of discussion both in the comments to the post and also support and ideas on other blogs. I also had a good talk (I know, face to face, how archaic :) with Jeremy Frey about the idea. Here I want to collate a few of the comments and ideas.

A whole series of things have converged in the last couple of days for me. First was Jean-Claude’s description of the work [1, 2] he and Brent Friesen of the Dominican University are doing putting the combi-Ugi project into an undergraduate laboratory setting. The students will make new compounds which will then be sent for testing as antimalarial agents by Phil Rosenthal at UCSF. This is a great story and a testament in particular to Brent’s work to make the laboratory practical more relevant and exciting for his students.
At the …

I’ve been mulling over this for a while, and seeing as I am home sick (can’t you tell from the rush of posts?) I’m going to give it a go. This definitely comes with a health warning as it goes way beyond what I know much about at any technical level. This is therefore handwaving of the highest order. But I haven’t come across anyone else floating the same ideas so I will have a shot at explaning my thoughts.
The Semantic Web, RDF, and XML are all the product of …

DUE TO SEVERE COMMENT SPAM ON THIS POST I HAVE CLOSED IT TO COMMENTS
On February 28/29 we held a workshop on our Blog Based notebook system at the Cosener’s House in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. This was a small workshop with 13 people including biochemists (from Southampton, Cardiff, and RAL), social scientists (from Oxford Internet Institute and Computing Laboratory), developers from the MyGrid and MyExperiment family and members of the the Blog development team. The purpose of the workshop was to try and identify both the key problems that need to be …

One thing that we have been thinking about a bit recently is how best to link elements of a peer reviewed paper back to an Open Notebook. There are a number of issues that this raises, both technical and philosophical about how and why we might do this. Our first motivation is to provide access to the raw data if people want it. The dream here is that by clicking on a graph you are taken straight through to processed data which you can then backtrack through to get to …