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.

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.

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 .

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.

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;

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. Currently I am in Gaithersburg at the CanSAS V meeting.

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.

This quote is grabbed from a comment by Jean-Claude Bradley at bbgm in reply to my comment on Deepak’s post on my post on…. anyway my original comment was that our Wiki review would not be indexed on Google Scholar which is where people might go for literature searches Now this is an interesting point and it mirrors what I do. Jean-Claude has established that a lot of the ‘new’ traffic coming to UsefulChem comes from Google searches for

I was looking through the website of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council the other day looking for policies on data sharing and open access. You can find the whole policy here but here are the edited highlights; Ten years?

Via Jean-Claude Bradley on UsefulChem, an article in Wired on making more of the ‘Dark Data’ out there available. As Jean-Claude notes this is focussed mainly on the notion of ‘failed experiments’ and ‘positive bias’ but there is much more background data out there. Experiments that don’t quite make the grade for inclusion in the paper or are just one of many that may be useful from a statistical perspective.