Research tools: Jump off the page : Naturejobs

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-03-28

Summary:

"Two years into his PhD, Carl Boettiger needed a better way to organize his data and synthesize his ideas. Fishing around online, he stumbled across chemist Cameron Neylon's open electronic lab notebook. Boettiger, who was studying mathematical ecology, liked what he saw. Neylon, now advocacy director at the Public Library of Science in San Francisco, California, had pulled back the curtain on the steps and thought processes behind his protocols and research. His data collection, protocols and results were linked together and available online, making the concepts easy to reference and explore. Inspired, Boettiger created his own electronic notebook, reporting online about his day-to-day research in a publicly available wiki that is followed by the open-science community. Viewers can find the notebook through the wiki's RSS feed and links on social media as well as in Google searches, and can post comments. He soon started to receive suggestions about, and valuable feedback on, his research and methods from other scientists โ€” mostly followers of open science from outside his field โ€” and some even led to collaborations. Four years on, Boettiger, now a theoretical ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a leader in the use of the open notebook. He is convinced of its value, and he is not alone โ€” the idea is steadily gaining traction in some (but not all) scientific circles. Whether on paper or in digital form, lab notebooks are meant to document exactly what, when and why experiments were done (see 'Record of achievement') and usually contain much more information than will ever be published in an academic paper. They can be used as evidence for securing patents, to settle legal issues or to pass a project from one researcher to another. Industry labs almost always require their researchers to maintain such records, as do many academic principal investigators, and until very recently the information would be kept securely under wraps in the lab until it was published ..."

Link:

http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7493-523a

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) ยป abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.tools oa.social_media oa.twitter oa.mendeley oa.open_science oa.data oa.open_notebooks oa.software oa.advocacy

Date tagged:

03/28/2014, 08:47

Date published:

03/28/2014, 04:47