Is your science ready for total transparency? Jean-Claude Bradley, a chemist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, works on the synthesis of new antimalarial compounds using Open Notebook Science — a practice that makes all aspects of experiments and lab notebooks publicly available online.
During a question-and-answer session on the Sceptical Chymist blog, Nature Chemistry associate editor Neil Withers asked him when he last did an experiment in the lab.
“September 3, 2008. While I was in Southampton I spent the day with Cameron Neylon and we measured the solubility of a few compounds in organic solvents.” The results are available online . Bradley continues: “We used this as an example of how people can perform simple experiments and report measurements publicly that are difficult to find, even in expensive databases. We aim to collect a completely public dataset of solubilities of common compounds in organic solvents and create a predictive model.” Chemists can best contribute to the world at large by sharing more data more quickly, says Bradley.
Nature 455, xi; 30 October 2008
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From the blogosphere by Maxine Clarke
An archive of the "From the Blogosphere" column on the Authors page in Nature, highlighting nature.com blog posts of interest to scientists in their role as authors and peer-reviewers. We welcome comments and suggestions.
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Open notebook science -- 30 October 2008
- Date:
- Thursday, 30 Oct ober 2008 - 16:49 UTC
Last updated: Thursday, 30 Oct 2008 - 16:49 UTC
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Comments
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I am rather reassured. I’ve been slacking off on making my notebook entries – either on paper or online – and I see that Jean-Claude does experiments with his own hands in the wet lab at a similar frequency to me. One keeps (very very) busy, but I always feel inadequate if I am not actually carrying out an experiment at a bench.
My institutional legal department got quite down on my keeping a notebook online recently. They’re not crazy about us not signing off on one anothers’ notebooks, either, for “intellectual property” potential uses. Sigh.
That’s sad, Heather. I wonder if Jean-Claude or Cameron can help there, as they must have come across similar (legal) issues. I think Peter Murray-Rust has talked previously about various related problems in attempting to achieve “open chemistry”.
I’m not particularly worried. It just goes to show that people from different departments in a single organization have quite different blinkers on. For example, there are people here who spend all day, every day, placing product orders for us – thank goodness for them, because without them my professional life would be that much more unpleasant. But it would be lovely if they understood that getting the nomenclature code for the type of item we are ordering just so, for reporting purposes, is perceived to be a large waste of time by most scientists because it takes time away from the purpose to which that item was to be put originally. So my interests are generally divergent from those of the legal department.
Heather,
Do you have to get permission before publishing a paper? Essentially it is the same principle – it just happens faster with ONS.
The nuance is that I have not yet been told off because I have not sought permission before publishing a paper. But I am sure the legal department would like me to, so they could negotiate copyright. I’ve just kept my head low.
You’re right, though, I should remember that ONS is about transparent communication, and communication is one of my explicit missions.