There's something that we've been neglecting on our Labtrove ELN entries so far that we should probably deal with. Metadata. It would be great to add some more of this to our posts but the question is what would be most useful? Labtrove adds metadata in the same way as it add "Sections", i.e. it places them onto the menu on the right hand side. The problem with this is: if the precise yield is given in the metadata then it lists every single yield on the right hand side making for inconvinient reading.
I have just packaged up TCMDC-123794 (PMY 11-2) and -123812 (PMY 10-2) along with the parent acid (PMY 8-2), ester (PMY 6-1), aldehyde (PMY 2-4), near neighbour analogue (PMY 14-1) and also the acylurea by-product (P
Saw this very interesting article/development. Intel sponsoring research at top universities, but heavily encouraging the projects to be open source and the universities not to take out patents. A bold step, very counter to the philosophy that is so familiar to any current academic. From the website:
I recently gave a talk on open science at Ignite Sydney. These talks are a real challenge in that you have 5 minutes to get across an idea, with the slides rotating every 15 seconds behind you. The event was in a cool club/gallery in the middle of Sydney, and is the first talk I've ever given where I was preceded by a beatbox act. Apparently I was the first scientist to go to Ignite Sydney.
TDI/TSL's paper entitled "A kernel for the Tropical Disease Initiative" is published today in Nature Biotech. We're very pleased an open source project has been published in such a high-ranking journal, and we hope this stimulates the interest of the scientific community in what's possible. Naturally, we want people to contribute to the science!
This paper will shortly be followed by a full article in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
Cameron Neylon has initiated an experiment in the open assembly of a paper on how the aggregator site FriendFeed is impacting the way we collaborate/do science. The background to the call can be found here, and the abstract is being assembled here. This is an open paper-writing project, so please feel free to chime in.
Can we publish papers based on data that have previously been made public? Is a conference presentation prior disclosure? If we worked together to write a review article on a wiki, can we submit it for publication? If we conduct an open source research project with a number of collaborators on a website, where can we send the resulting articles for peer-review?
These issues are important. It is difficult to recommend conducting open research to students if they cannot be sure to get peer-reviewed papers out of their research.
The policies of many journals are out of date on these issues, owing to the enormous advances in web technologies over the last few years. To clarify such policies, a few of us have assembled a draft letter we intend to send to publishers.
Following on from last week's news from GSK comes a potentially very important announcement from Merck about Sage, a large deposition of biological data and software to the commons. Links and discussion here.
