Open-notebook science

Open-notebook science is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded. This involves placing the personal, or laboratory, notebook of the researcher online along with all raw and processed data, and any associated material, as this material is generated. The approach may be summed up by the slogan 'no insider information'. It is the logical extreme of transparent approaches to research and explicitly includes the making available of failed, less significant, and otherwise unpublished experiments; so called 'dark data'.[1] The practice of open notebook science, although not the norm in the academic community, has gained significant recent attention in the research[2][3] and general[1][4] media as part of a general trend towards more open approaches in research practice and publishing. Open notebook science can therefore be described as part of a wider open science movement that includes the advocacy and adoption of open access publication, open data, crowdsourcing data, and citizen science. It is inspired in part by the success of open-source software[5] and draws on many of its ideas.

  1. ^ a b Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments, Goetz, T., Wired Magazine, Sept.25, 2007
  2. ^ Sanderson, K; Neylon, C (September 2008). "Data on display". Nature. 455 (7211): 273. doi:10.1038/455273a. PMID 18800097.
  3. ^ Singh, S. (April 2008). "Data on display". Cell. 133 (2): 201–3. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2008.04.003. PMID 18423188.
  4. ^ Williams, A. (2008). "Internet-based tools for communication and collaboration in chemistry". Drug Discovery Today. 13 (11–12): 502–506. doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2008.03.015. PMID 18549976.
  5. ^ "Chemical & Engineering News - Serving the chemical, life sciences and laboratory worlds".