openwetware

The Boston Globe has recently published an article showcasing a few projects that belong to what they refer to as “a peaceful insurgency in science”, an open-science movement per se.

Barry Canton, Ph.D. graduate at MIT and co-founder of OpenWetWare, is portrayed as an example of this movement. By posting his work on OWW (and also to an established journal!), his work has been incorporated into 18 different projects in other labs.

Other projects mentioned are Science Commons, also based at MIT, and the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE).

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.

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.

It’s almost officially Summer here in the northern hemisphere but there is still time to do some spring cleaning.

As you can see, we’ve changed the name of our main blog from Steering Committee to Community, to reflect what we thing it should be about - Not only the steering committee’s views and operations but what the OWW community at a whole has to show the world.

The name change is just the first step among many new features we’ll be bringing to the OWW Community blog over the next weeks. To keep up-to-date, we suggest that you visit us regularly or subscribe to our feed.

Note: Although we’ve changed the title and subsequently the blog’s address, our RSS subscribers should not see much of a glitch. If you do happen to find anything broken, please let us know.