I have said before that I think we could benefit from the involvement of social scientists in understanding the possible cultural issues involved in the move towards more open practises.

Sometimes you read things that just make you angry. I’m not sure I can add much to this eloquent article written by Andrew Vickers in the New York Times (via Neil Saunders and the 23andme blog). Shirley Wu has recently written on the fears and issues of being scooped and whether this is field dependent or not.

There has been a bit of discussion recently about identifying and promoting ‘wins’ for Open Science and Open Notebook Science. I was particularly struck by a comment made by Hemai Parthasarathy at the ScienceBlogging Meeting that she wasn’t aware of any really good examples that illustrate the power of open approches.

Michael Barton has a very nice little video on web tools for science and sharing up at Bioinformatics Zen.

Shirley Wu has followed up on her original proposal to submit a session proposal for PSB. She asks a series of important questions about going forward on this and I thought I would reply to these here to widen exposure. I think it is worth going for a session and I am happy to lead the application but there may well be better people; Jean-Claude, Antony Williams, Peter Murray-Rust, Egon Willighagen to get to lead it depending on focus.

Shirley Wu from Stanford left a comment on my New Years Resolutions post suggesting the possibility of a session on Open Science at the PSB meeting in Hawaii in 2009 which I wanted to bring to front for peoples attention. She also has a post on her new blog One Big Lab where she fleshes out the idea in a bit more detail and which is probably the best place to continue the discussion. Hi Shirley!

Ok, having flagged up two surveys in my previous post I have now done the second one. It seems to be for anyone worldwide but I wanted to bring it to people’s attention because it further clouds the definition of Open Access, whether deliberately or through ignorance I can’t say. Fairly early on we have the following question: BBB doesn’t seem to even exist as an option! And then in the following panel;

UK PubMedCentral, a UK mirror of PMC and a growing project at the British Library is soliciting responses to a survey: Much of the survey asks questions about what additional tools you use for scientific search etc and what features you would like to see in UK PMC. This worries me as it seems like duplication both of effort and the creation of yet another del.icio.us/Facebook/Google/whatever for scientists.

I spent last week in Cuba. I was there on holiday but my wife (who is a chemistry academic) was on a work trip to visit collaborators. This meant I had the opportunity to talk to a range of scientists and to see the conditions they work under.

I don’t usually do New Year’s resolutions. But in the spirit of the several posts from people looking back and looking forwards I thought I would offer a few. This being an open process there will be people to hold me to these so there will be a bit of encouragement there. This promises to be a year in which Open issues move much further up the agenda. These things are little ways that we can take this forward and help to build the momentum.

There were lots of helpful comments on my previous post as well as some commiseration from Peter Murray-Rust. Also Jean-Claude Bradley’s group is starting to face some similar issues with the combi-Ugi project ramping up. All in the week that the Science Commons Open Data protocol is launched.