Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Jean-Claude Bradley on open notebook science

Bill Turner, The Pursuit of Automation: Open Notebook Science. The Per Contra Interview with Jean-Claude Bradley, Per Contra, Summer 2007.  (Thanks to Coturnix.)  Excerpt:

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 (SEE THE NOTES HERE) 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....

“What makes UsefulChem a little bit different than other open source science projects is that we actually keep our official laboratory notebooks on a public wiki.” ...

Bradley...explains that the date and time stamp actually records a researcher’s thoughts as he goes.  The benefit is that any theft of an idea is open for the public to see, because the idea is traced with clear markers on the software available to all.  Instead of clamping down the notebook and attempting to hide the idea, the researcher protects his idea by allowing everyone to see it and know that it was his idea on a specific date and at a specific time....

“It doesn’t stop me...from writing standard articles and submitting them to journals,” he says.  Right now, they’re trying to find out which publisher will take a paper that has had its research made public on a wiki....