I am thinking about how to present the case for Open Science, Open Notebook Science, and Open Data at Science in the 21 ^st Century, the meeting being organised by Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Image via Wikipedia This has taken me longer than expected to write up. Julius Lucks, John Cumbers, and myself lead a workshop on Open Science on Monday 21 ^st at the BioSysBio meeting at Imperial College London.Â

Perimeter Institute by hungryhungrypixels (Picture found by Zemanta). Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics are organising a conference called ‘Science in the 21st Century‘ which was inspired in part by SciBarCamp.

Two things last week gave me more cause to think a bit harder about the RSS feeds from our LaBLog and how we can use them. First, when I gave my talk at UKOLN I made a throwaway comment about search and aggregation. I was arguing that the real benefits of open practice would come when we can use other people’s filters and aggregation tools to easily access the science that we ought to be seeing.

One thing that we have been thinking about a bit recently is how best to link elements of a peer reviewed paper back to an Open Notebook. There are a number of issues that this raises, both technical and philosophical about how and why we might do this.

I have said before that I think we could benefit from the involvement of social scientists in understanding the possible cultural issues involved in the move towards more open practises.

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.

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.