I’ve been fiddling with this post for a while and I’m not sure where its going but I think other people’s views might make the whole thing clearer. This is after all why we believe in being open. So here it is in its unfinished and certainly unclarified form. All comments gratefully received.

Yesterday afternoon the Open Notebook Science case studies session was held as part of the Scifoo lives on sessions at Nature Island, Second Life. Jean-Claude Bradley organised, moderated and spoke first followed by me and Jeremiah Faith. We all spoke about experiences and implementation of different approaches to open notebook science. Jean-Claude has put the transcript up here.

I am continuing this in a new post rather than keeping mucking with the old one. Currently I am working on reproducing the description of Exp098 from Jean-Claude Bradley’s UsefulChem Wiki within our blog based notebook to identify differences in practise.

In a previous post I said I would try to replicate an experiment from the UsefulChem open Wiki notebook within our blog system to see how it might look. This post is to record what I am doing as I do it. Thus this is the lab book I am using to record the process and decisions I have taken in using a lab book.

Having just posted that there didn’t seem to be too much of this we have a talk in the Social Sciences parallel session that covers exactly this.Pete Edwards talked (amongst other things) about ourSpaces, a tool providing a resource for sharing resources that can be tagged in all the expected Facebook style ways. He then went on to talk about how you record both data and how it is recorded i.e. methodology.

Some responses to John Wood’s talk on e-science infrastructure at AHM2007. The talk focussed on large scale infrastructure and the need for co-ordination. There are serious political and logistical problems for making proper coordination happen. A couple of interesting comments came out; Need for the involvement of historians and sociologists to follow what is happening.

Some themes seem to emerge to me from the talks I have been to. One is that the many people are talking about the need to expand the reach of e-science tools out to the ‘general scientific community’.  As I noted in other posts part of this is a problem with language.

Brief notes on this parallel session from E-science all hands meeting on Tuesday morning. First talk in this session discussed the CARMEN project which aims to provide repositories and tools for neuroscience electrophyisology data. There was a short discussion on the challenges of persuading scientists to put the data in. The speaker’s (Paul Watson) view was that this would probably need to be driven by funders and journals.

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 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.