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

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.

I blogged the other day about the way charges for reproducing figures in review articles appear to have gone ballistic. At that stage I only had the cost for J Biol Chem which was a whopping $USD73 to reproduce a figure. I had three other images I was using and was expecting around $20 for them, based on the website that Science Direct points you at for permissions. Well I was wrong, they have now come back at $USD3 each.

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.

Interesting morning negotiating the problems of getting permission to re-produce figures in a review I am currently writing. I wanted to reproduce figures from four papers, two from J Mol Biol (Elsevier), one from Structure (Cell Press), one from J Biol Chem (ASBMB). I could request permission for all three journals from copyright.com and as I’m in a rush I did this.