I wanted to followup on the post I wrote a few days ago where I quoted a post from Black Knight on the concept of making methodology open. The point I wanted to make was the scientists in general might be even more protective of their methodology than they are of their data. However I realised afterwards that I may have given the impression that I thought BK was being less open than he ‘should’, which was not my intention. Anyway, yesterday I spent several few hours reading through …

Continuing the discussion set off by Black Knight and continued here and by Peter Murray-Rust I was interested in the following comment in Black Knight’s followup post (my emphasis and I have quoted slightly out of context to make my point).
But all that is not really what I wanted to write about now. The OpenWetWare (have you any idea how difficult it is to type that?) project is a laudable effort to promote collaboration within the life sciences. And this is cool, but then I realize that the …

I wrote the other day about the idea of fun being a motivating factor to taking up open notebook science. Sometimes something is just cool and you want to share it. Then along comes a great example.
Via petermr’s blog:
At ‘Life of a Lab Rat‘:
This has got to be in the running for the coolest cloning experiment ever.
Last Tuesday a grad student in the reciprocal space cadet lab, let’s call him Fu Manchu, asked me if I had any GFP. ‘GFP’ expands to ‘green fluorescent protein’……[]
As petermr says this is …

The reasons for pursuing more openess in science from the perspective of the science and funding communities have been well rehearsed and described elsewhere (see 3 Quarks Daily 1,2, and 3 for an excellent overview). There are excellent discussions of where this might take us in terms of capability and in terms of the efficient re-use of government or charity funded research. These are the reasons why many funding organisations and government bodies are beginning to mandate open access publication and making data publicly available.
Most scientists are, I think, reasonably …

Open [oh-puhn ] (adjective) not closed…having no means of closing or barring…relatively free of obstruction…without restrictions as to who may participate…undecided; unsettled… (from Dictionary.com)
There is a great deal of confusion out there as to what ‘Open’ means, especially in science. The definitions above seem particularly apposite ‘…relatively free of obstruction…’. Certainly undecided or unsettled seems appropriate in some cases. The claims of a journal to be ‘Open Access’ can set off a barrage of comment in the blogosphere. Whether this makes any difference to the journal is unclear but …