#solo2010: Sharing Data is Good for All of Us

Dictated into Arcturus

We are delighted that Heather Piwowar has offered to help on the project. This is specially exciting as she says “I know nothing about chemistry” – I doubt that’s absolutely true but I’ll take her at her word. This means that anyone can help. Already she is organizing the Wiki and starting to increase the use of the IsItOpenData resource (http://www.isitopendata.org/ ). I’ll talk more about that later…

Here’s Heather… (http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/green-chain-reaction-project-putting-my-minutes-where-my-mouth-is/ )

Green chain reaction project: putting my minutes where my mouth is

Quick post to highlight a really cool project that is worth following, and participating in!, right now.

The Green Chain Reaction is a ground-breaking, innovative, global experiment. It will apply open data and citizen science to rapidly investigate:

“Are chemical reactions in the literature getting greener?”

Background work will be done in the next month, and some of the investigation will take place in real time at Science Online London 2010. As such the project will be highly visible.

Do you believe in the power of open data, open science, citizen science, and fun sprints around an important problem? Do you talk about it? Then join us.

Yup, us. I’m helping. I’m putting my minutes where my mouth is, and reallocating a few hours in the next month to the cause. I know nothing about chemistry. That is no problem, everybody can help. I’ll probably focus on writing to publishers asking for clarification about whether their publications can be data-mined.

You can help extract information from full text publications, test some software, help flush out the wiki, tweet about the experiment, contribute ideas, etc.

Don’t wait, check it out now and participate with some minutes. This sprint is only on for a month…

ps Kudos to Peter Murray-Rust, Simon Hodson, and the conference organizers for initiating this project. Innovative, informative, and exciting.

I hope this helps you also to jump in…

Heather is, of course, a star in her own right as she has seminally shown that if you share your data you get more citations. The first step to sharing your data is to find it. Then you have to make it available and if you post it Openly on the Web, with a CC0 or PDDL license then anyone can find it and re-use it. When they re-use it, they cite it. Bingo!

The International Union of Crystallography are showing this enlightenment by exposing their data and we thank them for it. Actually it’s much more than that as they have also worked tirelessly to try to persuade other publishers to expose their data. And to the credit of the ones that agree, they have also exposed their data. So kudos to the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society for making their crystallographic data Open. As a result I expect they get more citations.

Those publishers also expose some of their chemical syntheses and we’d like to follow that up in this project. Because it would help not only in this project but also in the more general area of getting better quality science. Here are some simple mantras:

Open Data is Shared Data

Open Data means Better Science

Shared Data gets More Citations

Better Science gets More Citations

And so

Making Data Open is Good for Everyone

If Heather finds time among the Wiki tending she can point to more convincing figures.