Scientia Crastina

"In the early years of blogging, digital journal keepers became more and more candid and open towards the digital world around them, disclosing even private information about their lives. A similar trend can currently be noted in the area of personal homepages in science. Accordingly, a global community of scientists have finally taken the last steps towards total openness and become Open Notebook scientists, hence 'making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded' [Wikipedia].  This means that they are giving the world— both friend and foe—free access to their  lab notes (sometimes even including failed experiments) as well as raw data and unpublished results. One of the trailblazers in this area is Carl Boettiger, currently a post-doc in Theoretical Ecology and Evolution at University of California, Santa Cruz. In a Nature interview in January 2013, he explained that it started like 'a kind of career experiment' and that he hadn’t yet experienced any scoops. 'I think it is an overrated fear, especially when compared with the risk of being unknown in your field.', he said. Carl has an extraordinarily structured personal homepage, including a thorough description of his Experiments with Open Science.  Scientia Crastina decided to get in touch for some questions ..."