Koch was participating in a panel about Open Science something or other (to be edited when he reads this and corrects me) and asked me to fill in for him for his Junior Lab class. I (liking to take on more than I can handle) said yes and away we went.

He asked if I could discuss my notebook, talking about the technical details about WordPress and the plugins that it offers. He also asked that I talk a little bit about my science and why it was so interesting. I took it from there.

I admit that I did very little preparation. I jot down some ideas about where I wanted to lead the discussion. Typically when I speak, I prefer there to be more discussion then just one person lecturing for 50 minutes (and Koch likes it that way too). So I started class with the question “What are some of the biggest obstacles of open notebook science, and how can you think of overcoming them?” From there I let the students discuss amongst themselves for about 5 minutes and then we conversed.

Of course the major response was the fear of being scooped. Another response was potential funding issues. We actually didn’t get much into others because I wanted to talk about what people usually tell me what they are afraid of and how I counter the argument.

I started with Jean Claude Bradley’s line, “Most scientists are too busy with their own work to steal someone else’s.” Which I believe is very true. Think about this, a lab has a bunch of equipment and experiments. All of which are very time intensive and costly. If you tell them a great idea, they would have to invest all sorts of other time and money to pick up your idea. They would ruin the investment that they put into their own experiments which is not only disheartening, but also likely to displease your funding agency (because you aren’t doing what you promised to do!).

Then we talked about the potential hazards with funding. I told the students about our own positive experiences with potential funding agencies and how the most positive feedback from grants is aimed at the aspect of open notebook science and open science in general.

During the group work I heard students mention positive aspects like transparency in data and results, which was really good to hear that there isn’t as much fear about the unknown as I’m used to hearing amongst my peers.

I then moved the discussion to different open notebooks. I told them that I have tried basically everything, and they all work in their own way. For me it all came down to organization and search indexed.

I explained how wikis and OpenWetWare specifically is great for a lot of things (easy to use, customizable, etc), but that it fails in one key aspect: organization. If you don’t keep track of what you do on a wiki then it will be lost forever.

On the flip side I explained that I had used Google Docs to fix the organizational aspect, but then found out that it failed in another way: search indexed. Google Docs for some reason don’t show up in Google search results which means no one can find your content (which to me defeats the whole purpose of an open notebook).

I then explained how I moved on to WordPress by donating my personal website for the pursuit of science. We discussed the major positives for using WordPress: developer friendly, easy to use, organized, search indexed, customizable, site analytics, and commenting.

Eventually I ran out of time because there is a lot that I could talk about, and wanted to talk about. Hopefully I’ll get another chance. If I do I would talk about the real world results I’ve been getting because of the notebook: network connections I’ve made, the modern impact factor because of social networking, experimental feedback, etc.

I think most effectively I could do a series of talks (maybe two or three) that highlight open notebook science. The first would be an intro to ONS: what it is, what people are afraid of, the benefits, the drawbacks, etc. The second would be a how to: available tools, what is required in a notebook. And maybe a third would be what being an open notebook scientist has done for me, basically a bunch of anecdotes and case studies (from experience) of how ONS has influenced my career.

I think with more organization something like that would be very helpful to the young scientific community both here at UNM and anyway over the world (webcast!).