One of the strong messages that came back from the workshop we held at the BioSysBio meeting was that protocols and standards of behaviour were something that people would appreciate having available. There are many potential issues that are raised by the idea of a ‘charter’ or ‘protocol’ for open science but these are definitely things that are worth talking about.

I am thinking about how to present the case for Open Science, Open Notebook Science, and Open Data at Science in the 21 ^st Century, the meeting being organised by Sabine Hossenfelder and Michael Nielsen at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Image via Wikipedia This has taken me longer than expected to write up. Julius Lucks, John Cumbers, and myself lead a workshop on Open Science on Monday 21 ^st at the BioSysBio meeting at Imperial College London.Â

I’m afraid I didn’t manage to record anything in the end. Video card on laptop wasn’t up to the job. Will try to write a report up over dinner tonight and post later.

Tomorrow myself and a few of the usual suspects, who I have finally met in person are giving a workshop on ‘Open Science’ as part of BioSysBio 2008. If anyone else who I haven’t met yet is about at the meeting then feel free to introduce yourself, even if you can’t make it to the workshop. The workshop abstract is up on OpenWetWare if you want to have a look.

Frank Gibson has posted again in our ongoing conversation about using FUGE as a data model for laboratory notebooks. We have also been discussing things by email and I think we are both agreed that we need to see what actually doing this would look like. Frank is looking at putting some of my experiments into a FUGE framework and we will see how that looks. I think that will be the point where we can really make some progress.

How do we actually create the service that will deliver on the promise of the internet to enable collaborations to form as and where needed, to increase the speed at which we do science by enabling us to make the right contacts at the right times, and critically; how do we create the critical mass needed to actually make it happen?

Image via Wikipedia There have been a number of interesting discussions going on in the blogosphere recently about radically different ways of practising science. Pawel Szczesny has blogged about his plans for freelancing science as a way of moving out of the rigid career structure that drives conventional academic science.

The mainstream media has a lot of negative things to say about blogs and user based content on the web. Most of them can be discounted but there is one that I think does need to be taken seriously. The ability of communities to form and to some extent to close around themselves and to simply reinforce their own predjudices is a serious problem and one that we need to work against.

Image via Wikipedia Just a very brief note, which really follows on from the vigorous discussion in Jennifer Rohn’s blog at Nature Networks this week, to say that the guys at OpenWetWare appear to have gone live with some of the new functionality for laboratory notebooks on the wiki. Check it out from the OWW main page. I will have a closer look and make some comments as and when I have a bit of time but it looks like a good start.