DUE TO SEVERE COMMENT SPAM ON THIS POST I HAVE CLOSED IT TO COMMENTS On February 28/29 we held a workshop on our Blog Based notebook system at the Cosener’s House in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

I have got very behind. I’ve only just realised just how far behind but my excuse is that I have been rather busy. How far behind I was was brought home by the fact that I hadn’t actually commented as yet that the proposal for an Open Science session at PSB that was driven primarily by Shirley Wu has gone in and the proposal is now up at Nature Precedings. The posting there has already generated some new contacts.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week I was lucky to be able to attend a conference on Electronic Laboratory Notebooks run by an organization called SMI. Lucky because the registration fee was £1500 and I got a free ticket. Clearly this was not a conference aimed at academics. This was a discussion of the capabilities and implications for Electronic Laboratory Notebooks used in industry, and primarily in big pharma.

There were lots of helpful comments on my previous post as well as some commiseration from Peter Murray-Rust. Also Jean-Claude Bradley’s group is starting to face some similar issues with the combi-Ugi project ramping up. All in the week that the Science Commons Open Data protocol is launched.

Our laboratory blog system has been doing a reasonable job of handling protocols and simple pieces of analysis thus far. While more automation in the posting would be a big benefit, this is more a mechanical issue than a fundamental problem. To re-cap our system is that every “item” has its own post. Until now these items have been samples, or materials. The items are linked by posts that describe procedures.

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 .

This morning I got to sit down with Bill Flanagan, Barry Canton, Austin Che, and Jason Kelly and throw some ideas around about electronic notebooks. This is an approximate summary of some of the points that came out of this. This may be a bit of brain dump so I might re-edit later. Neither Wikis nor Blogs provide all the functionality required.

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.

I am in the process of preparing the talk I am giving at Drexel next month and have been going over the early versions of our Lab Blog and getting a clearer picture of how our usage has evolved. I wanted to record this so will write some notes as I go. To re-iterate our key aims were to capture and record the data and to make it available in a way that would allow machine processing.

Peter Murray-Rust is going to take an Open Notebook Science approach to a project on checking whether NMR spectra match up with the molecules they are asserted to represent. The question he poses is how best to organise this.