Life of a Lab Rat

While in the UK I got a fair bit of exposure to the whole 'Open Science' schtick, participating in the Southampton workshop and meeting Jean-Claude and Cameron.

Openness is arguably the great strength of the scientific method.

Cameron is serializing a long essay he wrote on open science, and I encourage you to read it. Additionally, over at Nature Network, Jenny has been stirring the pot a bit, mulling over what might happen if science was as intensely scrutinized by the media as is, say, the love lives of sportspeople. Heather then suggested that we (i.e. practising scientists) made three 'press-releases' a day to see if we could generate enough 'news'.

You don’t necessarily need to be a great scientist, or even a great blogger, for the material to be of potential interest to historians in 50-100 years time.

Facebook is actually a terrible medium for this, so I created a FriendFeed Room. Any scientists reading this should feel free to join the experiment. You're smart enough to work out problems of confidentiality, I'm sure. It's only been going (looks...) 16 hours, but seems to be generating quite a bit of interest.

It's not quite Open Notebook Science, but then the newspapers don't tell you what's really happening either. Perfect.