In the first post in this series I identified a series of challenges in scholarly publishing while stepping through some of the processes that publishers undertake in the management of articles. A particular theme was the challenge of managing a heterogenous stream of articles and their associated heterogeneous formats and problems, in particular at a large scale.

This started out as a comment on Peter Murray-Rust’s response to my post and grew to the point where it seemed to warrant its own post.

More on the discussion of structured vs unstructured experiment descriptions. Frank has put up a description of the Minimal Information about a Neuroscience Investigation standard at Nature Precedings which comes out of the CARMEN project. Neil Saunder’s has also made some comments on the resistance amongst the lab monkeys to think about structure. Lots of good points here. I wanted to pick out a couple in particular; From Neil;

Frank Gibson of peanutbutter has left a long comment on my post about data models for lab notebooks which I wanted to respond to in detail. We have also had some email exchanges. This is essentially an incarnation of the heavyweight vs lightweight debate when it comes to tools and systems for description of experiments.

‘No data model survives contact with reality’ – Me, Cosener’s House Workshop 29 February 2008 This flippant comment was in response to (I think) Paolo Missier asking me ‘what the data model is’ for our experiments.

This morning I got to sit down with Bill Flanagan, Barry Canton, Austin Che, and Jason Kelly and throw some ideas around about electronic notebooks. This is an approximate summary of some of the points that came out of this. This may be a bit of brain dump so I might re-edit later. Neither Wikis nor Blogs provide all the functionality required.

Given that most people reading this probably also read the UsefulChem Blog I would guess that they have already figured out I am visiting the States. However as I am now here and due to jet lag have a few hours to kill before breakfast I thougt I might detail the intinerary for anyone interested. Currently I am in Gaithersburg at the CanSAS V meeting.

I am in the process of preparing the talk I am giving at Drexel next month and have been going over the early versions of our Lab Blog and getting a clearer picture of how our usage has evolved. I wanted to record this so will write some notes as I go. To re-iterate our key aims were to capture and record the data and to make it available in a way that would allow machine processing.