Shirley has already posted a quick notice on this but I thought I would follow up. Our proposal for a session at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing on Open Science was successful and we have been asked to put together a workshop session to run on January 5 next year in Hawaii. This is a slight departure for PSB. The workshop sessions are slightly shorter than the traditional sessions and full papers will not feature in the proceedings.

There has been a bit of discussion recently about identifying and promoting ‘wins’ for Open Science and Open Notebook Science. I was particularly struck by a comment made by Hemai Parthasarathy at the ScienceBlogging Meeting that she wasn’t aware of any really good examples that illustrate the power of open approches.

Michael Barton has a very nice little video on web tools for science and sharing up at Bioinformatics Zen.

Shirley Wu has followed up on her original proposal to submit a session proposal for PSB. She asks a series of important questions about going forward on this and I thought I would reply to these here to widen exposure. I think it is worth going for a session and I am happy to lead the application but there may well be better people; Jean-Claude, Antony Williams, Peter Murray-Rust, Egon Willighagen to get to lead it depending on focus.

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. 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!

I spent last week in Cuba. I was there on holiday but my wife (who is a chemistry academic) was on a work trip to visit collaborators. This meant I had the opportunity to talk to a range of scientists and to see the conditions they work under.

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.

So while I have been buried in the paper- and lab-work there has been quite a lot of interesting stuff going on. Pedro Beltrao has started an Open Notebook style project at Google Code which he describes in a post on Public Ramblings. This in interesting, because once again someone is using a different system as an Open Notebook. We have Wiki’s, Blogs, TeX based documents, and now, software version repositories being used.

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 .