Cameron's Open proposal

In the last two days Cameron Neylon has posted an idea for Open Science and got a lot of interest, see: e-science for open science – an EPSRC research network proposal and Follow on to network proposal. The idea is to create networks of excellence  in escience (cyberscholarship) and Open (Notebook) Science would fit the bill perfectly. I’d be delighted to be part of Cameron’s proposal and this can be taken as a letter of support (unless the powers that be insist on a bit of paper with a logo which is a pain in the neck).

One of the secrets of cyberscholarship is that it flourishes when people do not want to run everything themselves in competition with everyone else. Chemistry often has a very bad culture of fortification rather than collaboration – hence there was so little effective chemistry in the UK eScience program. Southampton has been a notable exception, and for example, we are delighted to be part of the eCrystals program they are running. The last year has shown that at grass roots, chemistry is among the leaders in Open Science and Cameron has detailed this in his proposal

 There are several areas where we’d like to help:

• making the literature available to machines (OSCAR) and thereby to the community
• distributed collaborative management of combinatorial chemistry (we can now do this with CML for fragments)
• shared molecular repositories (again we have a likely collaboration with Soton here)
• creation of shared ontolgoies (we collaborated with Soton during the eScience program).

(I’ve been spending time coding rather than  blogging and – blink for a day – find out what I’d missed).