On Wednesday and Thursday this week I was lucky to be able to attend a conference on Electronic Laboratory Notebooks run by an organization called SMI. Lucky because the registration fee was £1500 and I got a free ticket. Clearly this was not a conference aimed at academics. This was a discussion of the capabilities and implications for Electronic Laboratory Notebooks used in industry, and primarily in big pharma.
For me it was very interesting to see these commercial packages. I am often asked how what we do compares to these …

Sometimes you read things that just make you angry. I’m not sure I can add much to this eloquent article written by Andrew Vickers in the New York Times (via Neil Saunders and the 23andme blog).
Shirley Wu has recently written on the fears and issues of being scooped and whether this is field dependent or not. Her discussion, and the NYT article seems to suggest that these fears are greatest in precisely those disciplines where sharing could lead to advances with direct implications for people, their survival, and their quality …

There has been a bit of discussion recently about identifying and promoting ‘wins’ for Open Science and Open Notebook Science. I was particularly struck by a comment made by Hemai Parthasarathy at the ScienceBlogging Meeting that she wasn’t aware of any really good examples that illustrate the power of open approches. I think sometimes we miss the most powerful examples right under our nose because they are such a familiar part of the landscape that we have forgotten they are there. So let us imagine two alternate histories; I have …

I don’t usually do New Year’s resolutions. But in the spirit of the several posts from people looking back and looking forwards I thought I would offer a few. This being an open process there will be people to hold me to these so there will be a bit of encouragement there. This promises to be a year in which Open issues move much further up the agenda. These things are little ways that we can take this forward and help to build the momentum.

I will adopt the NIH Open …

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council currently has a call out for proposals to fund ‘Network Activities’ in e-science. This seems like an opportunity to both publicise and support the ‘Open Science’ agenda so I am proposing to write a proposal to ask for ~£150-200k to fund workshops, meetings, and visits between different people and groups. The money could fund people to come to meetings (including from outside the UK and Europe) but could not be used to directly support research activities. The rationale for the proposal would …

In a recent post I extolled the possible virtues of Open Notebook Science in avoiding or ameliorating the risk of being scooped. I also made a virtue of the fact that being open encourages you to take a more open approach; that there is a virtuous circle or positive feedback. However much of this is very theoretical. We don’t have good case studies to point at that show that Open Notebook Science generates positive outcomes in practice. To take a more cynical perspective where is the evidence that I am …

I have been waiting to write this post for a while. The biggest concern expressed when people consider taking on an Open Notebook Science approach is that of being ‘scooped’. I wanted to talk about this potential risk using a personal example where my group was scooped but I didn’t want to talk about someone else’s published paper until the paper on our work was available for people to compare. Our paper has just gone live at PLoS ONE so you will be able to compare the two sets of …

I got to meet Jeremiah Faith this morning and we had an excellent wide ranging discussion which I will try to capture in more detail later. However I wanted to get down some thoughts we had at the end of the discussion. We were talking about how to publicise and generate more interest and activity for Open Notebook Science. Jeremiah suggested the idea of a Sourceforge for science; a central clearing house somewhere on the web where projects could be described and people could opt in to contribute. There have …

Given that most people reading this probably also read the UsefulChem Blog I would guess that they have already figured out I am visiting the States. However as I am now here and due to jet lag have a few hours to kill before breakfast I thougt I might detail the intinerary for anyone interested.

This is reply continuing the conversation with Peter Murray-Rust on his plans for an Open Notebook Science based project. I have cut a lot of the context to keep the post size to a manageable level so if you want to track back see the original two posts from Peter, my response, and Peter’s response to that in full.
I should add that I am not a coder in any form so where this gets technical I am proposing things in principle (or hand waving as some might put it :).
PMR: …