My contract agreement with the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) contains a paragraph that states that the FWO postdoctoral fellows are obliged to submit all the publications fully or partially funded by the FWO to a public ‘Open Access’ database, within one year after publication. It also strongly suggests researchers to deposit their data in Open Archives.
The very interesting talk Communicating primary research publicly by Heather Etchevers, Jean-Claude Bradley and Bob O’Hara at SciBlog inspired me to take this required openness on research findings to another level: open coffee research.
Bob et al. showing the way to Open Coffee research at the Library, Royal Institution, London.
How far I will be able to take it will depend on the willingness to share of my research partners (after all, I am not dealing with Daphnia here, but with genomes of an important crop wild relative). Anyway, to get things started with Open Coffee, I have registered with Open Wet Ware and have created an Open Notebook for my coffee research. Keep an eye on Nature Precedings for the first results, as I will move to the lab soon to extract the DNA of my first 64 test samples.
So, is most of the research in your field conducted in the private or public sector?
Forest ecology and forest restoration research (my main field of expertise) is usually carried out by governmental research institutes, universities and ngo’s – the public sector I would say (even if my university is actually a private institution). Coffee, resins and oils – non-timber forest products in the region where I work – are part of our research, but evidently these also attract interest from the private sector (usually large multinationals).
Oh, fun. Keep us updated. I’m interested to see how other people accept the idea, and if they don’t, what arguments they use against it. I’d love open notebooks to work and be adopted, but it needs a shift in culture (there’s a blog post here, based on the discussions at the conference).
It was also nice to meet you, even if we didn’t get to chat as much as I would have liked. That goes for several other people too!
Bob – update nr. 1: I have already managed to mess up the notebook entry page and now everything got stuck. The people at OWW are looking into it and assured me it will be worth the trouble once it is up and running.
Looking forward to seeing the results!
Raf, great to see this. Please do keep us updated as you go forward with this. Success stories, and indeed discussion of problems and difficulties, are a very important part of developing these approaches.
Update: Coffea sample metadata online
The DNA extraction protocol (generic, not yet tested for coffee) is posted in my open notebook