Nature News article on Data on Display

Katherine Sanderson interviewed Cameron Neylon and I during my visit at the Nature offices a few weeks ago. The interview appeared on the Sept 15, 2008 edition of Nature News:

Data on display

Two researchers explain why they're posting their experimental results online.

Risking being scooped and having patents refused, some scientists are posting their data online as they produce them. Organic chemist Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and biochemist Cameron Neylon of the University of Southampton, UK, describe this 'open notebook' approach.

We were actually a little more cheerful than we appear in the photos.

Jon Udell Interviews me for ITConversations

Update: the transcript is now available.

My interview is now available on the ITConversations podcast. Jon Udell did a great job of covering lots of territory:

• Open Notebook Science and UsefulChem
  and a mention of our Mettler-Toledo trial
• our collaboration with Rajarshi Guha and Phil Rosenthal
  
• screencasting (a term coined by Udell by the way)
  
• teaching chemistry (in collaboration with Andy Lang) with Second Life
• Nature Island and ACS Island
  
• intellectual property and Open Science
• the role of competition in science
• the role of wikis and blogs in ONS
• Drexel Island on Second Life (a mention of Beth Ritter-Guth)
  
• the avatar effect
• poster presentations in Second Life
• Jon teaches me how to do a screencast inside Second Life
  

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.

Marketplace Segment on Open Notebook Science

The NPR interview on Open Science I discussed two weeks ago has aired and is now available.

I think it was very well balanced. The positive aspects of not losing failed experiments was weighed against the difficulties in publishing in some journals and of deriving profit.