Open Science Session at PSB 2009?

Shirley Wu from Stanford left a comment on my New Years Resolutions post suggesting the possibility of a session on Open Science at the PSB meeting in Hawaii in 2009 which I wanted to bring to front for peoples attention.

[…] Since you mentioned organizing an international meeting on the subject and publicizing open science, Iâ€ m curious what your thoughts (and anyone elseâ€ s who reads this!) would be on participating in a session on Open Science at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing at PSB. They donâ€ t traditionally cover non-primary research/methods tracks, but they do pride themselves on being at the cutting edge of biology and biocomputing, so I am hoping they will be amenable to the idea. If there was support from, shall we say, the founders of this movement, I think it would help a great deal towards making it happen. […]

She also has a post on her new blog One Big Lab where she fleshes out the idea in a bit more detail and which is probably the best place to continue the discussion.

Hi Shirley! Great to have more people out there blogging and commenting. I am not sure whether I really qualify as a ‘founder of the movement’. I know things are moving fast, but I don’t think having been around for nine months or so makes me that venerable!

This sounds broadly like a good idea to me. I was considering trying to organise a meeting in the UK towards October – November this year but the timelines are tight and really dependent on money coming through. I would be happy to push back to Jan 2009 in Hawaii if people felt this was a good idea; if the grant comes through we could use this as the first annual meeting. My only concern is that Hawaii probably increases average costs for people as more people have to come further and book accomodation than if it is either Western Europe or East Coast US. The other issues is how and whether to focus such a session. I also don’t see a problem with having two meetings ~6 months apart. What do people think?