OpenWetWare.org

Open Source Science, Open Notebook Science, Science 2.0 – call it what you want, but the notion of the scientific community sharing their data openly online is a heavily written about topic in magazines and blogs. In January 2008 Scientific American published an article called "Science 2.0: Great New Tool or Great Risk?" which talked about the future of science, how the scientific community could be using the web more effectively and why many are reluctant to do so. One of the success stories mentioned in the article that I found particularly interesting was OpenWetWare.org

In April 2005 graduate students at MIT created OpenWetWare, which was initially a private lab wiki for two science laboratories at MIT. However, in June of 2005 the site opened itself up for any lab to join. According to their information page, the site is now currently editing over 13,404 pages by 6,571 users. These users come from more than 100 research laboratories in over 40 institutions including Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Stanford, Johns Hopkins and here at the University of Texas . Labs involved in OpenWetWare come from around the world - in Asia, Europe, Australia, South America and the United States.

OpenWetWare was created in an “effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering.” The wiki site provides a place for people and laboratories to “organize their own information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently.” It offers links to blog posts, a place to share research protocols, materials, resources, and other lab techniques. The wiki page even allows for users hosts courses where they can post lab results, ask each other questions, discuss the answers and collaborate on papers.

The site runs on customized MediaWiki software and uses Linux servers. According to the Wikipedia entry about OpenWetWare, all of the content “is available under free content licenses, specifically the GNU free documentation license (GFDL) and the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license.”

While I'm not certain exactly how much raw research data gets shared there, OpenWetWare is still interesting to me for two reasons. The first reason is that it started out simply and small as a wiki intended for two laboratories to be able to better communicate and share information, and it has grown and evolved into so much more than that. It even earned a grant from the National Science Foundation in May 2007 in an effort to continue evolving into a self-sustaining community. Secondly, the success of OpenWetWare, and new early success stories like the already mentioned PLoS Currents: Influenza, gives me hope that more in the scientific community will see the benefit of open sharing and online collaboration, and will overcome their reluctance to join in the open source science revolution.