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 .

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;

I like to think of myself as still a young person – in many ways I am stretching the definition but I still just about qualify for various schemes for ‘young scientists’ that cut out at the age of 35 or nine years post PhD. However I have to admit that I have been feeling a bit old recently.

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 and a few others have been working for some time on converting a review I wrote some time ago for publication on OpenWetWare. Jason Kelly put the initial work in in developing an area for reviews and it was from him that I had the idea of taking this forward. The traditional review is a cornerstone of the research literature. The first port of call for virtually any researcher on moving into an unfamiliar area is to find a good review.

Looking at the EPSRC website I came across the following call for proposals involving collaboration between a US and UK programme: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/CallsForProposals/NSF-EPSRCChemistryProposals07.htm Now, being an academic I’m up for any method of trying to get money out the system, especially special programmes.

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?