Open Science at BioSysBio – London 20-22 April

As part of the BioSysBio meeting being held in London 20-22 of April, Mattias Rantalainen kindly asked me to contribute to a workshop on Open Science being held on the Wednesday. A number of OpenWetWare people including Julius Lucks and John Cumbers have agreed to come on board to help. You can see the draft abstract which is up at OpenWetWare. If you are the meeting do come along either to cheer us along in our quest to enthuse the next generation of scientists about Open Stuff or to argue with us about the details of how to do it. I wanted to flag two things up here. One is that we propose to start thrashing out a ‘Protocol for Open Science’; a charter of rights and responsibilities that we hope we can agree as a community to adopt as a standard, or perhaps set of standards.

I don’t imagine this will be an easy process but the aim is to start to define the issues with the aim of taking this forward over the next 12-18 months. An initial draft will be put forward at the workshop and will be made available for community discussion.

More practically Julius has set up an openscience email list based at OpenWetWare. You can sign up just by adding your OWW username to the wiki List page (you do have to be a member of OWW but this is just a matter of signing up). This will be useful for carrying on the conversation not just about standards but also about the all the issue surrounding being open.

I propose the tag osci-protocol to capture the blog based discussion and other discussion.