Nanodot has been included in a list over at Masters in Clinical Research of the Top 50 Blogs by Scientific Researchers. Samantha Reno writes:
Scientific researchers need to keep notes. What better way to journal a journey into a specific scientific project than on a blog? While a reader may not find specific details about a science experiment, researchers can offer insights, news, trends and projects. These top 50 blogs by scientific researchers include individuals who focus on open source and open access, academia, projects funded by organizations and news produced by writers who research science.
The blogs are organized into “Academic Blogs,” “Research Blogs,” “Open Access | Open Source,” “Organizations, Businesses and Tools,” and “Other Blogs”. All of the half dozen blogs I looked at were worth my time. The section on open access, open source and open science was especially informative. To give just one example, the Useful Chemistry blog opens with a report on the “Nanoinformatics 2010 Conference Report:”
On November 3, 2010 I presented on “The implications of Open Notebook Science and other new forms of scientific communication for Nanoinformatics” at the Nanoinformatics 2010 conference.
The presentation first covers the use of the laboratory knowledge management system SMIRP for nanotechnology applications during the period of 1999-2001 at Drexel University. The exporting of single experiments from SMIRP and publication to the Chemistry Preprint Archive is then described followed by the evolution to Open Notebook Science in 2005. Abstraction of semantic structure from ONS projects in the areas of drug discovery and solubility is then detailed as an efficient mechanism to provide web services and machine readable data feeds.
This was a terrific opportunity to tie together my current ONS projects with my work in nanotechnology about 10 years ago, when the focus was to capture laboratory information in a structured format so that autonomous agent could begin to replace human workflows. I found it really interesting that the most active workflows back then were related to processing reference information. It took a team of students to find, photocopy and scan many of our key papers, with all the problems that come with training and managing new students. Today, obtaining relevant papers and extracting metadata is not so much of a challenge with tools like Mendeley. I ended the talk with a mention of our use of Mendeley tags to share dynamic links of article collections. …
Whether or not Open Science will get us advanced nanotechnology and artificial general intelligence faster than conventional science remains to be seen, but this list of blogs provides great pointers for following progress. Thanks to Alba Collazo, Co-founder, Clinical Research Blog, for notifying us of Nanodot’s inclusion in their list and for bringing this resource to our attention.
