Our laboratory blog system has been doing a reasonable job of handling protocols and simple pieces of analysis thus far. While more automation in the posting would be a big benefit, this is more a mechanical issue than a fundamental problem. To re-cap our system is that every “item” has its own post. Until now these items have been samples, or materials. The items are linked by posts that describe procedures.

The following comment was posted to the ‘About‘ page by Sharon Sonenblum from Georgia Tech. Rather than leave it there where people might not see it I thought I would bring it to the front for everyone’s attention. Hi Sharon, great to see people interested in ONS! I am sure others will offer comments and suggestions but I will put my tuppence in first.

So while I have been buried in the paper- and lab-work there has been quite a lot of interesting stuff going on. Pedro Beltrao has started an Open Notebook style project at Google Code which he describes in a post on Public Ramblings. This in interesting, because once again someone is using a different system as an Open Notebook. We have Wiki’s, Blogs, TeX based documents, and now, software version repositories being used.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I have not in fact fallen off the end of the world. I have just been a little run off my feet over the last week or so. A quick weekend trip to the south of France (see here for probably rather too much detail) and a lot of other things, not least some wrangling over allowed costs for the grant, have been keeping me busy.

Enough said. Thanks to everyone who helped. I will reflect on the process at a later stage and will put the complete proposal up as soon as I can. If anyone wants to send letters of support or get involved don’t feel that you’ve missed the boat. Whether the money comes up or not we ought to be doing something along these lines and I can always include more material when we reply to referee’s comments.

The text of the proposal is now in a near complete form. I need to add references and a few others things but it is mostly in reasonable shape. If you would like to have your name included as a founder member of the network please drop me a comment on this post, email, or if I have given you editing rights then feel free to add yourself.

Thanks to all those who have sent letters of support, paragraphs of text, and made comments or modifications to the proposal. Just a quick update on where we are. The text of the proposal is up at GoogleDocs. I believe I have given anyone who has commented on the original post access to edit but if not give me a yell or just send me any comments by email or pop them in as comments here.

Ok. In this morning’s post I proposed the idea of applying for some UK money to support meetings in the general area of open science. I’ve made a start with an outline on a GoogleDoc which can be viewed here. I have tried to set out some general headings and areas to be fleshed out and added a little text. This is early days but if anyone wishes to add anything then please feel free.

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council currently has a call out for proposals to fund ‘Network Activities’ in e-science. This seems like an opportunity to both publicise and support the ‘Open Science’ agenda so I am proposing to write a proposal to ask for ~£150-200k to fund workshops, meetings, and visits between different people and groups.

In a recent post I extolled the possible virtues of Open Notebook Science in avoiding or ameliorating the risk of being scooped. I also made a virtue of the fact that being open encourages you to take a more open approach; that there is a virtuous circle or positive feedback. However much of this is very theoretical. We don’t have good case studies to point at that show that Open Notebook Science generates positive outcomes in practice .