If it hasn’t been obvious from what has gone previously I am fairly new to the whole E-science world. I am definitely not in any form a computer scientists. I’m not a computer-phobe either but my skills are pretty limited. It’s therefore a little daunting to be going for the first time to an e-science meeting.

Well when it’s not open obviously. There are many ways to provide all the information imagineable while still keeping things hidden. Or at least difficult to figure out or to find. The slogan ‘No insider information’ is useful because it provides a good benchmark to work towards. It is perhaps an ideal to attain rather than a practical target but thinking about what we know but is not clear from the blog notebook has a number of useful results.

I attended the session held on Nature Island as part of the Scifoo Lives On series being organised by Jean-Claude Bradley and Bertalan Mesko and wanted to record some of my impressions. The mechanics of the meeting itself were interesting. My initial reaction to the idea of meetings in Second Life was pretty sceptical. My natural inclination would have been to setup some sort of video cast or conference call.

I don’t really want to add anything more to what has been said in many places (and has been rounded up well by Bora Zivkovic on Blog Around the Clock, see also Peter Suber for the definitive critique, also updates here and here). However there is a public relations issue here for the open science movement in general that I think hasn’t come up yet.

Just a short note to say we will be doing a demonstration of the blog notebook at the UK E-science All Hands meeting being held in Nottingham in a few weeks time. We will be on the BBSRC stall at 13:40 on Wednesday 12th September assuming everyone else runs to schedule. If you are at the meeting do drop in and say hello.

I wanted to pull out some of the comments Jean-Claude Bradley has made on the e-notebook posts and think them through in more detail. Thinking about this and looking at some examples on the UsefulChem Wiki I wondered whether this is largely down to a different way of thinking about the notebook rather than differences in field. I will use the UsefulChem Exp098 as an example for this.

In Part 1 and Part 2 I discussed the criteria we set for our system to be successful and the broad outlines of a strategy for organisation. In this part I will outline how we apply this strategy in practise. This will not deal with the technical implementation and software design for the Blog engine which will be discussed later.

I wanted to followup on the post I wrote a few days ago where I quoted a post from Black Knight on the concept of making methodology open. The point I wanted to make was the scientists in general might be even more protective of their methodology than they are of their data. However I realised afterwards that I may have given the impression that I thought BK was being less open than he ‘should’, which was not my intention.

In Part 1 I outlined our aims in building an ELN system and the criteria we hope to satisfy. In this post I will discuss the outline of the system that has been developed. The WebLog as an ELN system A blog is a natural system on which to build an ELN. It provides free text entry, automatic date recording, the ability to include images and other files, and a system for publishing and collecting comments and advice.

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.