Open Science

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!

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.

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.