Open 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approaches to research and explicitly includes the making available of failed, less significant, and otherwise unpublished experiments; the so called dark data.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.

(From Wikipedia)

While some groups use online, password protected, lab notebooks to share notes with collaborators, open notebook science takes this a step further by making day-to-day lab notes available in real time. By keeping notes online, rather than in an offline lab notebook, open notebook scientists are giving everyone direct insight into their work, and enabling easier collaboration. For example, you can find open notebooks on OpenWetWare (biology and biological engineering), Open Notebook Science Network (chemistry and other disciplines), or The IPython Notebook (interactive computational science).

This is quite a radical form of openness, and few bench scientists use a fully open notebook system at the moment. The general reluctance of many researchers to share ongoing research data is the fear of being scooped by competing groups in academia or industry, as well as being unsure whether they can still publish the work in their journal of choice afterwards. With the increased use of preprints in biology, more journals are developing guidelines about whether they will consider publishing previously shared research, which may alleviate some of the concerns about putting lab notes online.

Open notebook science shares some similarities with open data: both make the underlying research data public. However, where data sharing can occur at the point of publication of the resulting journal article, or after a conference (e.g. by uploading a conference poster or slides), open notebook science happens "live": data and methods are made public at the moment of collection