Per Contra Article on Open Notebook Science

Bill Turner has just posted an article he wrote about Open Notebook Science in Per Contra. Here is an excerpt:

The Pursuit of Automation: Open Notebook Science. The Per Contra Interview with Jean-Claude Bradley

What do you get when you combine transparency and raw data? Jean-Claude Bradley says you should get automation of the scientific process, and his Useful Chemistry project is acting as a laboratory for his hypothesis. For instance, when he attempted to expose a particular product missing a methyl group to fifty percent TFA/CDCl3, it should have caused the furfuryl group to cleave. It didn’t.

You probably have no idea what that means. Neither do I. But the result is published for the world to see in the Useful Chemistry blog, available for other scientists to scrutinize and to help them avoid the same dead end. “We are attempting to do science in as transparent a manner as possible,” Bradley says. And that means publishing results— failures and all—online as the research unfolds.

Isn't it great that the word "furfuryl" would show up in a publication described as "The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas"? That's another sign that the Open Science movement is gaining importance in the mainstream.