Open Notebook Science

Definition

1.

"Open Notebook Science is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded.” [1]

2.

".research already in progress is opened up to allow labs anywhere in the world to contribute experiments. The deeply networked nature of modern laboratories, and the brief down-time that all labs have between projects, make this concept quite feasible. Moreover, such distributed-collaborative research spreads new ideas and discoveries even faster, ultimately accelerating the scientific process." (http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/)

3. From the Wikipedia:

"Open Notebook Science is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded. This involves placing the personal, or laboratory, notebook of the researcher online along with all raw and processed data, and any associated material, as this material is generated. The approach may be summed up by the slogan 'no insider information'. It is the logical extreme of transparent approaches to research and explicitly includes the making available of failed, less significant, and otherwise unpublished experiments; so called 'Dark Data'. The practice of Open Notebook Science, although not the norm in the academic community, has gained significant recent attention in the research, general and peer-reviewed media as part of a general trend towards more open approaches in research practice and publishing. Open Notebook Science can therefore be described as part of a wider Open Science movement that includes the advocacy and adoption of Open access publication, Open Data, Crowdsourcing Data, and Citizen science. It is inspired in part by the success of Open Source Software[6] and draws on many of its ideas." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Notebook_Science)

Description

Jean-Claude Bradley:

"In Open Source Software, the code is made available to anyone to modify and repurpose. What we have been trying to do with UsefulChem is to provide the analogous entity for chemical research, which is raw experimental data along with the researcher's interpretation in a format that anyone can easily re-analyze, re-interpret and re-purpose. A good example of re-purposing is using some results and observations from a failed experiment in a way that was never intended by the original researcher. This just doesn't happen regularly in science because failed experiments are almost never included in publications.

Unfortunately, in addition to the confusion with Open Source Software, others are using the term Open Source Science to mean discussions about pre-prints of regular journal articles.

To clear up confusion, I will use the term Open Notebook Science, which has not yet suffered meme mutation. By this I mean that there is a URL to a laboratory notebook (like this) that is freely available and indexed on common search engines. It does not necessarily have to look like a paper notebook but it is essential that all of the information available to the researchers to make their conclusions is equally available to the rest of the world. Basically, no insider information." (http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/2006/09/open-notebook-science.html)

Example

1. UsefulChem

More Information

1. Mass-collaborative Science
2. Open Science; Science 2.0
3. Open Data

Also: Open Notebook Science search engine

It searches 7 sites so far, such as:

http://drexel-coas-elearning.blogspot.com/, http://openwetware.org/, http://chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/, http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com, http://usefulchem.blogspot.com

Podcast: Jean-Claude Bradley on Open Notebook Science