The third installment of the paper (first part, second part) where I discuss social issues around practicing more Open Science. Scientists are inherently rather conservative in their adoption of new approaches and tools. A conservative approach has served the community well in the process of sifting ideas and claims;

So a bit of a first for me. I can vaguely claim to have contributed to two things into the print version of Nature this week. Strictly speaking my involvement in the first, the ‘From the Blogosphere’ piece on the Science Blogging Challenge, was really restricted to discussing the idea (originally from Richard Grant I believe) and now a bit of cheerleading and ultimately some judging.

I am currently sitting at the dining table of Peter Murray-Rust with Egon Willighagen opposite me talking to Jean-Claude Bradley. We pulling together sets of data from Jean-Claude’s UsefulChem project into CML to make it more semantically rich and do a bunch of cool stuff. Jean-Claude has a recently published preprint on Nature Precedings of a paper that has been submitted to JoVE.

One of the many great pleasures of SciFoo was to meet with people who had a different, and in many cases much more comprehensive, view of managing data and making it available.

An update on the Workshop that I announced previously. We have a number of people confirmed to come down and I need to start firming up numbers. I will be emailing a few people over the weekend so sorry if you get this via more than one route. The plan of attack remains as follows: Meet on evening of Sunday 31 August in Southampton, most likely at a bar/restaurant near the University to coordinate/organise the details of sessions.

I am too tired to write anything even vaguely coherent. As will have been obvious there was little opportunity for microblogging, I managed to take no video at all, and not even any pictures. It was non-stop, at a level of intensity that I have very rarely encountered anywhere before.

The speaker had started the afternoon with a quote from Ian Rogers, ‘Losers wish for scarcity. Winners leverage scale.’ He went on to eloquently, if somewhat bluntly, make the case for exposing data and discuss the importance of making it available in a useable and re-useable form.

Pedro has written a thoughtful post detailing arguments he has received against Open Practice in science. He makes a good point that as the ideas around Open Science spread there will inevitably be a backlash. Part of the response to this is to keep saying – as Pedro does and as Jean-Claude, Bill Hooker and others have said repeatedly that we are not forcing anyone to take this approach.

*Written on the train on the way from Barcelona to Grenoble. This life really is a lot less exotic than it sounds…*  The workshop that I’ve reported on over the past few days was both positive and inspiring. There is a real sense that the ideas of Open Access and Open Data are becoming mainstream.

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.