The next post on open notebook science is up on Science Exchange, and here is a little snippet for your consumption:

The most important feature of an open notebook is accessibility. Your notebook must be accessible to yourself, and secondly to others. This means that you should be able to access the information whenever and wherever you are, so make sure you have a reliable hosting service. Access to others is equally important, as you have a responsibility to ensure the information is easy to find as well, necessitating an organized notebook with enabled search indexing.

And as a supplement to that I elaborate on the accessibility part of the article in an old notebook entry that you can find here. And for that there is a piece of information that I didn’t get to elaborate on in the Science Exchange post (that I really should write an entire article about somewhere):

Your notebook should be accessible. Not everyone understands what you are talking about, so there is nothing wrong with spending a little extra time to explain the jargony words you decided to use in a post. There are tons of papers that do a poor job of explaining their methods and results in plain english, and open notebook scientists don’t want to fall into that trap. After all, if peers can’t understand your language then your notebook is as useful as not having posted anything in the first place. Ok I’m exaggerating a little in that last part, but accessibility is important. No one wants to spend their time using a translator to understand the jargon in a notebook post.

Tomorrow I hope to have a really useful article up about ONS time management, as the dual blogging continues!