@AJCann: with so many organic chemists around, and that short list, would you label it as a hype then? - Egon Willighagen

No, not hype. But I am concerned that the open model is not taking off as fast as I would have hoped. And I'm certainly not in a position to harm my own career by being open in isolation as opposed to part of a strong community. I wish I could take more of a leadership role, but with the cuts coming in UK HE and a family to feed and educate, that's not possible for me at present. - AJCann

Agreed. 'Us' academics have a relatively luxurious situation... but even there, without tenure, there is only so much you can do to push these technologies... - Egon Willighagen

From an Open Source and Open Data perspective, I can say that it is an uphill battle with very slow advancements... - Egon Willighagen

Alan, to answer a simple question, with your expertise and background, an obvious contribution that does fit within the UsefulChem project would be pre-screening (computationally perhaps?) and/or screening compounds generated for anti-bacterial or anti-viral activity, either in in vitro assays or in vivo. Seems to me that just the correlations of a variety of compounds with a variety of assays could be useful. - Cameron Neylon

To the larger question my current feeling is that while there a few people out on the fringes with us we have had some success in shifting the Overton window. I think it is becoming much harder to say that you _can't_ do science completely in the open. I think the question of whether, or perhaps more usefully under what circumstances, it is successful and useful is the interesting thing to focus on. - Cameron Neylon

I can think of plenty of positive outcomes. The question I'm asking is, is adoption of open science just a matter of time, or is there some deeper structural barrier in the nature of science? In my case, if we go ahead we're likely to have an industrial partner. Hence the funding of science conflicts with aspiration to openness. - AJCann

I think you bring up the deep structural barrier, funding. Personally, you can start simple ... open source code, make all your data available in open repositories. You don't have to jump to open notebook science. - Deepak Singh

Michael Nielsen in his colloquium at UNM on Friday reiterated this point that many people have made. Scientists currently reap a competitive advantage from not being open. A top-down change (funding agencies and tenure & promotion committees) could change that quickly with good policy. For most principle investigators I know directly, taking a leap to open science would be foolishly risky, at least it seems. So, having the rewards system and policies changed would be quite helpful. - Steve Koch

In the case of my lab and students, it turns out that we've been rewarded immensely by participating in open science. These rewards are: (1) Extremely positive "broader impacts" ratings on NSF CAREER proposal (see slide 6 here: http://www.slideshare.net/skoch3... ). (2) Membership in and huge support from a global community of supporters of opening science. (3) Much personal satisfaction & happiness from not having to hide our ideas and discoveries, being able to do science as naive people think it should be done. We've received thank yous from several continents from people who've benefited from our open protocols, or been inspired to do open science themselves. (4) Several potential and very interesting collaborations that would not have happened without our openness. (5) Professional network and resume building for graduate and undergraduate students. Grad students in our lab are far more connected than I was in my closed laboratory as a grad student. - Steve Koch

Benefit #2 above has been absolutely wonderful for me and for my students too, I think. It's quite likely that that benefit will diminish as open science becomes normal. Perhaps #5 too will diminish. But the others are true benefits. I think there will be (is) turmoil as science transforms to more open practice. But truly, I think most scientists naturally want to be open. I think it's only a small fraction of scientists (albeit some very powerful) who lack creativity and can only prosper via deception and secrecy. The vast majority need to be secretive and closed to protect their funding and the delicate careers of their students and postdocs. They don't like it. I've talked to many who despise going to conferences unable to share their latest results, and having to race to publish thinking maybe they've tipped their hand too much. It's stressful and ridiculous. - Steve Koch

Michael Nielsen was very optimistic in his colloquium. He made the point that it's not up to individual scientists to make this happen. I think he thinks it's inevitable and so do I. He did list some steps people can take. Like Deepak said above, you don't have to do open notebook science, and in fact shouldn't if it's too risky. Some steps Michael listed: take special effort to cite open access sources such as OA pubs, blogs, preprints, etc. Give credit to colleagues for their OA or other open practices, for example when evaluating tenure or promotion. For you in particular, AJ, you've been doing some great things in your teaching. I think teaching undergraduates open science practice is a wonderful opportunity to plant seeds for change in the next generation. And it's bunch of fun too! - Steve Koch

Excellent contributions from you Steve :)) - Graham Steel

Thanks Steve. I feel that I have the advantage of "founder effect" in being open about my teaching practices. The difference between that and lab science is the funding. I don't need industrial partners to explore the teaching tools we've been using. Sadly, I will need that sort of money to run a research lab. - AJCann

Alan - my take on this would be to get yourself funded. I have one open project recently underway on the synaptic leap that is fully government funded, and I have just applied with four collaborators for a larger project in a hot area of basic synthetic organic chemistry that would also be completely open. The competitive advantage (rather than all the other obvious advantages one could list) is that open science is faster than closed lab science, which is good for everyone. That is, at least, a basic hypothesis that I think it would be interesting to test. Obtaining a grant to fund the kernel of activity that would come from your lab and the labs of your direct collaborators would mean you can develop some initial momentum. Without a grant, it's not a terribly level playing field. - Matthew Todd

Well as you might guess I agree with Cameron and Steve - the benefits for doing my projects ONS have greatly outweighed any risks - for many of the reasons Steve has nicely outlined. Cameron makes some suggestions about collaboration that make a lot of sense - let me know if you want to discuss. - Jean-Claude Bradley

As to the question of "success", it is a relative term. One could argue that TiVO is a failure because it did not bring down the advertising industry. Wide adoption is not always optimal - neither for TiVO or ONS. There is a competitive advantage to doing ONS because you can work more quickly and claim priority - even invalidating patent claims from your competitors - but only if they choose to work in secrecy. You should do ONS for the most selfish of reasons. If you don't think you will benefit from it (because of must-have collaborators or must-have patents, etc.) then it doesn't make sense to do it. - Jean-Claude Bradley

Steve, Alan -- I think the "founder effect" might diminish somewhat as the Open community grows, but not by much -- it's always going to be easier to network with someone with, as Steve puts it, the "naive" view of science, than with someone who's out to see what they can get from you without giving too much in return. Then, too, as the larger community grows, smaller field-specific "special interest groups" will form, offsetting the dilution effect. I guess I see the Open ethos as very much community- and co-operation centered, and the benefits that brings aren't going to go away because more people join the community. - Bill Hooker

Well, if everyone did ONS (if, for example, it became a criterion for publication, or even the accepted means of publication), then strictly speaking there would be no founder effect, but neither would there be any competitive disadvantage. I know the collaborative advantage is real (I have an example right now in the ed tech field). But that doesn't overcome the conflict with industrial funding. Is there any company which practices anything remotely like ONS? - AJCann

Not that I know of. Patents are the big reason industry won't work completely in the open, and even inter-company collaborations require entire teams of goddam lawyers. Granted the patent system is badly broken, with the "obviousness" requirement in particular being filleted ever finer until ridiculously incremental changes (not even improvments, though you have to lie and claim that) are granted as separate patents. But even if we could fix that, there remains the fact that if you bring out a product that's easy to reverse engineer and not subject to patent protection, someone will make a cheaper competing product. That many products are not simple to reverse engineer, and that you gain market advantage by being first, is not enough for the beancounting types. So I don't see an obvious way around this problem. Promoting consortia and similar inter-company collaborations is only a patch. - Bill Hooker

Bill I can see an advantage for companies to do some ONS as a cheaper way (compared to filing patents) to prevent their competitors from filing patents in areas close to their own portfolios. Companies already do this in the form of regular publishing - but ONS would be much faster. - Jean-Claude Bradley

JC I'd love to see the lawyers sitting down to discuss that :) - Deepak Singh from IM

AJ - I don't think ONS can ever be mandated via coercion - How can you prove that someone really didn't make public all of their failed experiments? I can see funders and journals requiring more than the absolute minimum that they now do for supplementary materials though. There are companies that have sponsored some of our ONS work - Sigma-Aldrich and Nature. You would have to ask to see who might be interested. - Jean-Claude Bradley

Deepak - the IP lawyers are probably not going to be pleased - they make the most money when patents are filed :) - Jean-Claude Bradley

it would be quite a funny conversation. Lawyer 1: Our scientists are going to report every step in their processes publicly. Lawyer 2: Is there any precedence for this. Lawyer 3: Our competitors are going to get all of our intellectual property. Lawyer 4: Call an ambulance. I think I am having a heart attack - Deepak Singh from IM

Deepak: if it scares away up to 1/2 of all the lawyers currently fastened, leech-like, to the underbelly of science, I'm for it. (I assume #4 won't actually have the heart attack, but will look for a different field to work in. Lawyer 3 might run away, too -- leaving #1 and #2 to do useful work.) - Bill Hooker

I learned about this trick of "aggressive disclosure" when I took a course on IP protection many years ago. One spin on this trick is to publish in obscure non-peer reviewed vehicles to get your competition to sink more money into a patent submission that will later turn out to be inadmissible because of prior art."Prior art must be available in some way to the public, and in many countries, the information needs to be recorded in a fixed form somehow" - it does not have to be easy to discover http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Jean-Claude Bradley