Blogging really can mean open science

An uplifting tale is unfolding over at De Rerum Natura. Back in 2005, blogger Reed Cartwright posted his thoughts on the genetics of an Arabidopsis mutant. It turned out that another researcher in the field was thinking along the same lines. Long story short: Reed was invited to be coauthor on this paper. The story has been picked up by The Scientist. Sadly, unlike the blog post and the paper, you need a subscription to read that article.

Take-home message: post your hypotheses, wild or otherwise, on your blog. You never know who might be reading.

Nota Bene

Tools for taking notes from web pages seem to be all the rage at the moment. Here, for example, is an abstract that I lifted from the journal Bioinformatics using the Clipmarks service:

clipped from bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org Summary: Biskit is a modular, object-oriented python library that provides intuitive classes for many typical tasks of structural bioinformatics research. It facilitates the manipulation and analysis of macromolecular structures, protein complexes and molecular dynamics trajectories. At the same time, Biskit offers a software platform for the rapid integration of external programs and new algorithms into complex structural bioinformatics workflows. Calculations are thus often delegated to established programs like Xplor, Amber, Hex, Prosa, Hmmer and Modeller; interfaces to further software can be easily added. Moreover, Biskit simplifies the parallelization of time consuming calculations via PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine).

Are these tools useful to the bioinformatician? Let’s compare and contrast three of them: Google Notebook, Zotero and Clipmarks.

Update: Pedro adds Diigo to the list