Brief notes on this parallel session from E-science all hands meeting on Tuesday morning. First talk in this session discussed the CARMEN project which aims to provide repositories and tools for neuroscience electrophyisology data. There was a short discussion on the challenges of persuading scientists to put the data in. The speaker’s (Paul Watson) view was that this would probably need to be driven by funders and journals.

Well when it’s not open obviously. There are many ways to provide all the information imagineable while still keeping things hidden. Or at least difficult to figure out or to find. The slogan ‘No insider information’ is useful because it provides a good benchmark to work towards. It is perhaps an ideal to attain rather than a practical target but thinking about what we know but is not clear from the blog notebook has a number of useful results.

I attended the session held on Nature Island as part of the Scifoo Lives On series being organised by Jean-Claude Bradley and Bertalan Mesko and wanted to record some of my impressions. The mechanics of the meeting itself were interesting. My initial reaction to the idea of meetings in Second Life was pretty sceptical. My natural inclination would have been to setup some sort of video cast or conference call.

I don’t really want to add anything more to what has been said in many places (and has been rounded up well by Bora Zivkovic on Blog Around the Clock, see also Peter Suber for the definitive critique, also updates here and here). However there is a public relations issue here for the open science movement in general that I think hasn’t come up yet.