As has been flagged up by Jean-Claude Bradley there are a couple of places now where people can sign up to say that they have Open Notebook Science in their laboratory, practise Open Notebook Science,or even would like to find a place where they can keep an Open Notebook.  Jean-Claude has put a list on the Nodalpoint Wiki and I have set up a database at DabbleDB.

This is reply continuing the conversation with Peter Murray-Rust on his plans for an Open Notebook Science based project. I have cut a lot of the context to keep the post size to a manageable level so if you want to track back see the original two posts from Peter, my response, and Peter’s response to that in full.

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.

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

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?

Via Jean-Claude Bradley on UsefulChem, an article in Wired on making more of the ‘Dark Data’ out there available. As Jean-Claude notes this is focussed mainly on the notion of ‘failed experiments’ and ‘positive bias’ but there is much more background data out there. Experiments that don’t quite make the grade for inclusion in the paper or are just one of many that may be useful from a statistical perspective.

I’ve been fiddling with this post for a while and I’m not sure where its going but I think other people’s views might make the whole thing clearer. This is after all why we believe in being open. So here it is in its unfinished and certainly unclarified form. All comments gratefully received.

Yesterday afternoon the Open Notebook Science case studies session was held as part of the Scifoo lives on sessions at Nature Island, Second Life. Jean-Claude Bradley organised, moderated and spoke first followed by me and Jeremiah Faith. We all spoke about experiences and implementation of different approaches to open notebook science. Jean-Claude has put the transcript up here.

Research in most places today is done under more or less rigorous safety regimes. A general approach which I believe is fairly universal is that any action should in principle be ‘Risk Assessed’. For many everyday procedures such an assessment may not need to be written down but it is general practise in the UK that there needs to be a paper trail that demonstrates that such risk assessments are carried out.