The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement has been growing quite significantly recently. I should say regrowing, given the fact that I recall reading Popular Mechanics do-it-yourself encyclopedias at least 15 years ago!

Anyhow, enter the Forbes DIY e-gang. Forbes has put together a short list of prominent names in the newly revived DIY movement like Dale Dougherty & Tim O’Reilly (Make Magazine), Neil Gershenfeld (Fab Labs), Jim Newton (TechShop), just to name a few.

Among the group spotlighted in Forbes is Reshma Shetty (Ginkgo BioWorks), a PhD graduate from MIT and also co-founder of OpenWetWare.

Shetty and colleagues (also MIT PhD graduates and co-founders of OpenWetWare) recently demonstrated how microorganisms can be manipulated quite easily to produce interesting results. In this case, they genetically transformed bacteria (E. coli) to produce a red glow. All this was done in a few simple steps as illustrated.

On a side note, I found it interesting that there was no mention of DIYbio, a group recently founded by Mackenzie Cowell and Jason Bobe in Cambridge, MA. Although not yet quite as grand as the DIYers mentioned in Forbes, but still noteworthy.

One recent SciFoo related post that caught my eye was Mario Pineda-Krch’s thoughts on the idea of distributed open notebook science. Yes, distributed.

As Mario mentions, by using a client based wiki setup like Tiddlywiki, the user has more flexibility by not having to rely on network access. Furthermore, a version control system like Git brings redundancy allowing anyone to download the latest version of the notebook. The wiki + the data with full control.

The idea of open notebook science is not necessarily a new one. The term was coined by JC Bradley roughly two years ago. However, it’s been tough to go mainstream due to the fact that notebooks are usually foreseen to be private, thus failing in the “open” department. However, this hasn’t stopped many from setting up lab notebooks online like Jean-Claude Bradley, Garrett Lisi or any of the dozens of OpenWetWare lab notebook users.

Earlier today fellow OWW blogger Cameron Neylon gave a talk at the Institutional Web Managers Workshop in Aberdeen and did so, not only for those present at the venue, but also to anyone with internet access.

Cameron set out to stream the talk via webcast, have updates via FriendFeed and also microblogging via Twitter.

The presentation was viewed by quite a few folks and many participated on FriendFeed. Cameron even stated that he noticed 20 new followers on his twitter account!

Giving talks can be stressful as is, so this requires some congratulating for the effort. Great work Cameron!

As many of you may have noticed, we’ve been adding a few new features to OWW’s side bar over the last few days. Among them you’ll find the quick nav, the feedback box and invite box.

Let me go over some of these new features so that you can take full advantage of them. Keep in mind that some of these features are only available for OWW community members. If you are not yet an OWW member, feel free to join us.

The Quick Nav
The quick nav is a cool dropdown select menu that displays your last 15 or so moves around OWW. This comes in handy when you are bouncing between pages. Just click and you’re there.

Bookmarking tools
We’ve added a few little icons that link to bookmarking tools like Connotea, CiteULike and del.icio.us. This will allow you to quickly save the revision of the page you’re currently looking at with all the relevant content required by these bookmarking services.

The Feedback box
As a way to further interact with our visitors and community, we’ve set up a quick feedback box that allows anyone to let us know their opinion regarding a specific question we happen to display within that box. It’s just a matter of typing in your short comment and click! It’s that simple.

 

Invite a friend
We are always interested in having new and interesting people join OpenWetWare. Therefore, we’ve set up a quick invite box that allows current OWW community members to invite their friends/colleagues to join.

We are cooking up the next batch of cool features… Do you have any ideas or suggestions for features you’d like to see developed/implemented on OWW? Let us know!

Tomorrow, July 10th at noon EDT, we’ll be having another one of our open town hall meetings at OWW. Anyone is invited to take part in the meeting, either via conference call or online chat. Details to get connected can be found here.

This month’s meeting will be focused around Lab Notebooks. We’ll be discussing what has already been done at OpenWetWare and what features should be added (or removed!), among other things…

If you happen to be interested in this topic, feel free to join in on the conversation and share your thoughts. If you can’t make it to the meeting, you can either leave your comments on this blog post or on the wiki, here.

Eva Amsen over at easterblot has made a really cool video about Lab waste that includes a list of ways we can reduce the amount of waste we generate in the lab.

Lab Waste from Eva Amsen on Vimeo.

All (or almost all) the elements in the video are licensed via Creative Commons, including the video. You can see the credits to the audio and visual elements here.

Just a few days ago, an article by Declan Butler was published in Nature regarding PLoS‘ open-access publishing model. This article was not well accepted by various open access advocates and science bloggers in general.

Johnathan Eisen from The Tree of Life was the first (that I noticed) to responde to the article and then many others followed along the same line.

Shortly after, Timo Hannay posted a “take two” at Nature’s Nascent that seemed to settle things down.

What I find to be the most notorious aspect in this whole string of events is that there is quite a large community of science bloggers that are ready to offer their “peer-review” in situations such as these. Is this a good thing? I would like to believe so…

Anyhow, I’ve only mentioned a few of the reactions. You can find plenty more reactions over at Bora’s Blog Around the Clock.

In the May/June issue of the Mathematics Association of America’s news magazine MAA Focus, you’ll find an article titled “Student Collaboration using a LaTeX wiki” [pdf].

The article demonstrates the usefulness of the LaTeX extension for MediaWiki by enabling this great syntax to be used online in a collaborative environment such as a wiki.

It just happens that the LaTeX extension referenced in the article was written by Austin Che, a member of OpenWetWare’s steering committee. Which means that we’ve had a LaTeX enabled wiki for quite a while now

If you don’t know what LaTeX is, I’d first suggest a read at Wikipedia’s LaTeX page.

If you’ve got a grasp of what LaTeX is, I’d recommend you head over to OWW’s LaTeX page where you’ll find information on the advantages and disadvantages, software for writing LaTeX, PhD thesis LaTeX templates and more…

Jonathan over at Working the bench has just recently posted about how impressed he is by OpenWetWare and the available protocols:

It takes a little digging, but the website is really sweet simply because it gives you the feel that, for any given protocol, you are looking at something that works. It’s been tested, validated, and in many cases even commented on and modified by any number of additional people.

Jonathan makes a good point here where he mentions that you are looking at something that has been tested, validated and in many times worked on collaboratively by a group of OWW members.

What Jonathan doesn’t mention is that although OWW is a great resource for protocols, there are other great features like the materials section, indexed reference sources and above all, a large community of researchers from all over the world.

A couple of prominent names of the open access movement, Bora Zivkovic and John Wilbanks, have recently published articles in the Journal of Science Communication regarding the future of the scientific paper and copyright, respectively.

Peter Murray-Rust shares his view regarding the latter where he expresses his thoughts about licensing schemes and how they hinder scientific data management:

If we try and apply ANYTHING other than the public domain to scientific facts we shall no be able to manage scientific data. Problems include aggregation, restrictions (however reasonable) on re-use, cascading attribution, different jurisdictions.

Other great articles I would recommend are Alessandro Delfanti’s take on Collaborative web science and Elisabetta Tola’s run on science blogging.