Lots of helpful comments from people on my question about what to use as a good identifier of chemicals? I thought it might be useful to re-phrase what it was that I wanted because I think some of the comments, while important discussion points don’t really impinge directly on my current issue.

We are in the process of rolling out the LaBLog system to the new bioscience laboratory within ISIS at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Because this is a new lab we have a real opportunity to embed the system in the way we run the laboratory and the way we practise our science. One of the things we definitely want to do is to use it to maintain a catalogue of all our stocks of chemicals.

Two things last week gave me more cause to think a bit harder about the RSS feeds from our LaBLog and how we can use them. First, when I gave my talk at UKOLN I made a throwaway comment about search and aggregation. I was arguing that the real benefits of open practice would come when we can use other people’s filters and aggregation tools to easily access the science that we ought to be seeing.

DUE TO SEVERE COMMENT SPAM ON THIS POST I HAVE CLOSED IT TO COMMENTS On February 28/29 we held a workshop on our Blog Based notebook system at the Cosener’s House in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

I have got very behind. I’ve only just realised just how far behind but my excuse is that I have been rather busy. How far behind I was was brought home by the fact that I hadn’t actually commented as yet that the proposal for an Open Science session at PSB that was driven primarily by Shirley Wu has gone in and the proposal is now up at Nature Precedings. The posting there has already generated some new contacts.

If you’ve been following the discussion here and over at the One Big Lab Blog you will know that tomorrow is the deadline for submission of proposals for sessions at PSB. Shirley Wu has done a great job of putting together the proposal text and the more support we can get from members of the community the better.

One thing that we have been thinking about a bit recently is how best to link elements of a peer reviewed paper back to an Open Notebook. There are a number of issues that this raises, both technical and philosophical about how and why we might do this.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week I was lucky to be able to attend a conference on Electronic Laboratory Notebooks run by an organization called SMI. Lucky because the registration fee was £1500 and I got a free ticket. Clearly this was not a conference aimed at academics. This was a discussion of the capabilities and implications for Electronic Laboratory Notebooks used in industry, and primarily in big pharma.

So we have received the referees comments on the network proposal and after a bit of a delay I have received permission to make them public. You can find a pdf of the referee’s comments here. I have started to draft a reply which is published on google docs. I have given a number of people access but if you are feeling left out and would like to contribute just drop me a line.

I have said before that I think we could benefit from the involvement of social scientists in understanding the possible cultural issues involved in the move towards more open practises.