What was your motivation behind making this project like open source science and what was your thinking behind doing it that way?
Well if you work in a lab for a couple of years one thing you realize is almost everything that you do doesn't get published because the experiments are either failed or they're sub optimal in some way and they have to be repeated. And they also have to make a story. So even though you may have done a reaction and we do organic chemistry so it's all reactions that actually worked if it doesn't fit into a bigger story that you can write up you really can't publish it. So what we're doing is we're not avoiding publishing normal articles it's just that we're basically putting our lab book on the wiki directly so that people can benefit immediately on a day to day basis.
Why do you think that open source science is going to be helpful in the future as compared to today's science broadcasting terms.
Well again I don't think it's an either or proposition we're not really replacing what people are doing right now. We are just adding to it. We're just making stuff available publicly that is normally not available. And there is a couple of reasons for wanting to do that. One of them obviously is you want people to understand what you're doing, be able to comment on it and you being able to help other people with their experiments. But another thing that I think is going to become important in the next few years is the integration with automation. So that right now my students are publishing experiments so that over time hopefully we will be getting machines to be publishing and reading experiments....[O]ne of the big things that I see coming in the next few years [is] the integration of open source science with a lot of automation....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/06/2006 12:38:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
