Continuing the discussion set off by Black Knight and continued here and by Peter Murray-Rust I was interested in the following comment in Black Knight’s followup post (my emphasis and I have quoted slightly out of context to make my point). A lot of the debate has been about posting results and the risk of someone stealing them or otherwise using them. But in bioscience the competitive advantage that a laboratory has can lie in the methods.

This is the starting point for a description of the development work being done in the School of Chemistry at the University of Southampton on a blog-based electronic laboratory notebook for biochemistry/molecular biology. Ultimately the aim is for this document to form the first draft of a paper describing the system.

I wrote the other day about the idea of fun being a motivating factor to taking up open notebook science. Sometimes something is just cool and you want to share it. Then along comes a great example. Via petermr’s blog: At ‘Life of a Lab Rat’: As petermr says this is just very cool. The molecular biology is fairly conventional. But that’s not the point.

The reasons for pursuing more openess in science from the perspective of the science and funding communities have been well rehearsed and described elsewhere (see 3 Quarks Daily 1,2, and 3 for an excellent overview). There are excellent discussions of where this might take us in terms of capability and in terms of the efficient re-use of government or charity funded research.

Open [oh-puhn ] (adjective) not closed…having no means of closing or barring…relatively free of obstruction…without restrictions as to who may participate…undecided; unsettled… (from Dictionary.com) There is a great deal of confusion out there as to what ‘Open’ means, especially in science.