OpenWetWare:PLoS community page

Overall thesis statement

OpenWetware facilitates the open communication of scientific information.

Intro

In the biological sciences, the primary mechanisms for sharing work have traditionally been reference books, journal papers and personal communications via conferences and invited talks. These publication venues all have two critical problems. First, each of these forms of publication comes at the end of a research project. There are few means to share information during the course of the research. As a result, much of the information generated during in research work is lost. Second, these publication mechanisms have largely failed to take advantage of the democratic and decentralized forms of communication made possible by the Internet. OpenWetWare (http://openwetware.org) represents an initial effort to decentralize and lower the barriers to information exchange among all researchers, be they professors, students or research scientists. It seeks to help forge a culture in which researchers openly share their experiences thereby reducing needless duplication of effort and improving the quality of the work.

Problems with the status quo

Explain in more detail

1. Much of the information in biological research is lost
2. Need to make it easier for people to share and digitize information; democratization of content generation and dissemination
   • Graduate students don't have easy time of disseminating pre-publication research results.

There is a steep learning curve to entering biology because much of what you need to know isn't written down.

Wikipedia

oww: prepublication; wikipedia: postpublication

oww: editors are scientists with some knowledge of field, each account associated with real person (accounts screened by real person), usernames are full names; wikipedia: anonymous editors, can't really know when you should trust a specific article

OpenWetWare's history

Not sure this section is needed or useful.

Initially called Endipedia, OpenWetWare began in May 2005 as a means of sharing and archiving information among members of Drew Endy's and Tom Knight's labs at MIT. Its utility in sharing protocols and providing a forum for brainstorming ideas quickly became apparent. In June 2005, Endipedia was renamed MIT OpenWetWare in an effort to include more research labs at MIT. The hope was that the wiki would provide another mechanism for interaction with local labs. By August 2005, there was sufficient interest from individuals and groups outside MIT that the wiki was renamed OpenWetWare such that any researcher or lab in biological science and engineering would be encouraged to participate. As of September 2007, OpenWetWare is home to over 100 labs and 3000 registered contributors from around the world.

Mission

The goals of OWW are to support open research, education, publication, and discussion in biological sciences and engineering. We promote and support collaborations among researchers, students, and others who are working towards these goals. We believe that open science improves the quality and pace of scientific and engineering research.

We are taking three approaches to achieve our mission

1. Lower the technical barriers to sharing and dissemination of knowledge in biological research.
   • Scientific and engineering research have strong traditions of publishing research. However, the pace of publishing research (often 6-12 months) has lagged the pace of research. Moreover, much of the information generated in the course of research fails to get captured in research articles (the traditional mechanism for sharing research). Thus, we advocate new, faster timescale publishing mediums like OpenWetWare that can capture biological knowledge as it is generated to complement the existing scientific publishing mechanisms. We are always seeking new tools and technologies that make this open sharing of research easier.
2. Foster a community of researchers in biology and biological engineering that values and celebrates the open sharing of information.
   • Peer review is a fundamental part of biological research. We use it to assess papers for publication, talks to be presented at conferences, grant proposals for funding and job hiring and promotion. Thus, an important part of our mission to promoter the open sharing of research is building a community that recognizes and values that sharing.
3. Explore how open publication platforms like OpenWetWare can tie into existing reward structures in research
   • Ultimately, for the open sharing and digitization of research to be standard practice in scientific research, it will need to be integrated into existing reward structures in science. Researchers need to "receive credit" when they make their protocols, datasets, model files etc. freely available to others. We consider this to be a critical but long-term goal of OpenWetWare.

Using OpenWetWare

To get people to share information, you need to make it easier for them to do the things they already do. (This is where OWW differs from existing efforts which tend to seek ways of fundamentally changing the way people do the work.)

Also you need to embed digitization and sharing within the research process.

Delineate how OWW is different from open access and other efforts.

All content is creative commons licensed and daily dumps of the database is provided.

Lab pages

common thing that most labs need but is annoying to do

Protocols

make it easier to share a protocol with labmates

highlight popular protocols (Sean's protocols, perhaps get quote from him about how many people asked him about the protocol before he posted and how many after as rough indicator of whether people are actually using it)

Lab notebooks

coordinate group projects

save the minutiae of research in digital form for posterity, things that are usually not written down or are difficult to find later in traditional paper notebooks due to time and ease of use cost

Collaborative Writing

collaborative editing, get to see iterations of the scientific process, wiki reviews

Future

1. Creating a publishing pipeline - embedding sharing and digitization into the research process from idea to paper
2. Changing the current reward structure to promote sharing
   • if all edits are associated with a single real person and have a timestamp, you should be able to get credit for the edit/idea
3. user community: associate more data with all users, allow building more communities on top (nerdbook?)

Acknowledgments

• OpenWetWare community
• NSF grant