Open notebook science

Open notebook science is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded. This involves placing the personal, or laboratory, notebook of the researcher online along with all raw and processed data, and any associated material, as this material is generated. The approach may be summed up by the slogan 'no insider information'. It is the logical extreme of transparent approaches to research and explicitly includes the making available of failed, less significant, and otherwise unpublished experiments; so called 'dark data'. The practice of open notebook science, although not the norm in the academic community, has gained significant recent attention in the research and general media as part of a general trend towards more open approaches in research practice and publishing. Open notebook science can therefore be described as part of a wider open science movement that includes the advocacy and adoption of open access publication, open data, crowdsourcing data, and citizen science. It is inspired in part by the success of open-source software and draws on many of its ideas.

The term "open notebook science" was first used in 2006 in a blog post by Jean-Claude Bradley, an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Drexel University at the time. Bradley described open notebook science as follows:

... there is a URL to a laboratory notebook that is freely available and indexed on common search engines. It does not necessarily have to look like a paper notebook but it is essential that all of the information available to the researchers to make their conclusions is equally available to the rest of the world

These are initiatives more open than traditional laboratory notebooks but lacking a key component for full Open Notebook Science. Usually either the notebook is only partially shared or shared with significant delay.

A public laboratory notebook makes it convenient to cite the exact instances of experiments used to support arguments in articles. For example, in a paper on the optimization of a Ugi reaction, three different batches of product are used in the characterization and each spectrum references the specific experiment where each batch was used: EXP099, EXP203 and EXP206. This work was subsequently published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments, demonstrating that the integrity data provenance can be maintained from lab notebook to final publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

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