Two rather exciting things are happening at the moment. Firstly we have finally got the LaBLog system up and running at RAL (http://biolab.isis.rl.ac.uk). Not a lot is happening there yet but we are gradually working up to a full Open Notebook status, starting by introducing people to the system bit by bit.

The second installment of the paper (first part here) where I discuss building tools for Open (or indeed any) Science. Tools for open science – building around the needs of scientists It is the rapid expansion and development of tools that are loosely categorised under the banner of ‘Web2.0’ or ‘Read-write web’ that makes the sharing of research material available.

On Monday 1 September we had a one day workshop in Southampton discussing the issues that surround ‘Open Science’. This was very free form and informal and I had the explicit aim of getting a range of people with different perspectives into the room to discuss a wide range of issues, including tool development, the social and career structure issues, as well as ideas about standards and finally, what concrete actions could actually be taken.

For the Open Science workshop at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing I wrote a very long essay as an introductory paper. It turned out that this was far too long for the space available so an extremely shortened version was submitted for the symposium proceedings. I thought I would post the full length essay in installments here as a prelude to cleaning it up and submitting to an appropriate journal.

A thought sparked off by a comment from Maxine Clarke at Nature Networks where she posted a link to a post by David Crotty. The thing that got me thinking was Maxine’ statement: Alright, in isolation this doesn’t look like much, read through both David’s post and the comments, and then come back to Maxine’s,Â

There has been a lot of commentary around the blogosphere about Sergey Brin’s blog post in which he announced that his SNP profile includes one variant which significantly increases his risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

I wouldn’t normally try to pick a fight with Chad Orzel, and certainly not over a post which I mostly agree with, but I wanted to take some issue with the slant in his relatively recent post We are science (see also a good discussion in the comments).  Chad makes a cogent argument that there is a lot of whining about credit and rewards and that ‘Science’ or ‘The Powers That Be’ are blamed for a lot of these things.

I hold no particular candle for traditional peer review. I think it is inefficient, poorly selective, self reinforcing, often poorly done, and above all, far too slow. However I also agree that it is the least worst system we have available to us.  Thus far, no other approaches have worked terribly well, at least in the communication of science research.

So a bit of a first for me. I can vaguely claim to have contributed to two things into the print version of Nature this week. Strictly speaking my involvement in the first, the ‘From the Blogosphere‘ piece on the Science Blogging Challenge, was really restricted to discussing the idea (originally from Richard Grant I believe) and now a bit of cheerleading and ultimately some judging.

Something that has been bothering me for quite some time fell into place for me in the last few weeks. I had always been slightly confused by my reaction to the fact that on UsefulChem Jean-Claude actively works to improve and polish the description of the experiments on the wiki.