Tuesday, April 24, 2012

The Purpose of This Blog

Inspired by blog posts from around the web, people around me, specifically my supervisor and his fight for doing "science in the open", I've decided that I also want to take part in this scientific movement in a form that is more subtle but which will benefit other people.

I'm particularly interested in providing the data from my own research for anyone to view or to do their own calculations on the data. Maybe someone discovers a better result hidden away in the data that I've not thought about or found. There is no real standard or golden path to follow when it comes to sharing data, so I guess I just have to see how it goes and present it in a form that I like and which is hopefully understandable for others. I think my greatest hope with this sharing of the data is that people can see how they could attack a scientific problem and first learn by following what I've done, and then extend it or take the research in another direction.

Sometimes the data will be published here and the scripts might show up on my blog on python in chemistry. Maybe there will be data shared via the excellent slideshare.net. I've also been recommended to try figshare.com/ which also lets you store data sets. One can also use services which stores information in plain text such as pastebin.com or even use gists (see a discussion on that in a blog post I wrote on the python in chemistry blog).

We'll see how it goes. I've thought about it for a while and at least I'd like to try it to discover a reasonable way to share data.

This is my attempt at contribution to do science in the open.

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