Slashdot Mirror
A New Kind of Science Collaboration
Scientific American is running a major article on Science 2.0, or the use of Web 2.0 applications and techniques by scientists to collaborate and publish in new ways. "Under [the] radically transparent 'open notebook' approach, everything goes online: experimental protocols, successful outcomes, failed attempts, even discussions of papers being prepared for publication... The time stamps on every entry not only establish priority but allow anyone to track the contributions of every person, even in a large collaboration." One project profiled is MIT's OpenWetWare, launched in 2005. The wiki-based project now encompasses more than 6,100 Web pages edited by 3,000 registered users. Last year the NSF awarded OpenWetWare a 5-year grant to "transform the platform into a self-sustaining community independent of its current base at MIT... the grant will also support creation of a generic version of OpenWetWare that other research communities can use." The article also gives air time to Science 2.0 skeptics. "It's so antithetical to the way scientists are trained," one Duke University geneticist said, though he eventually became a convert.
But you probably acquire quite a bit of data that doesn't get used for your peer-reviewed articles (maybe you got results that don't seem interesting). Would you consider putting that data on these websites so that other people could at least verify your "non-interesting" results, or know not to bother with the experiment? Even if you don't find a use for it, somebody somewhere might.