Biomedical Engineering Reference
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accessible on the Web as it is created and indexed by standard search engines.
This means that anyone can see the experiment as it is being executed and
share in the results. Predominately open-notebook science has been adopted
by academics but may become more popular inside commercial organizations
in the future.
The concept, while attractive from a collaborative standpoint, has its detrac-
tors. The most signifi cant issue is that publication in this manner constitutes
prior publication for patent purposes and will prevent the issuance of a patent
derived from the work. Clearly this limits the use of the approach in com-
mercial enterprises who would normally seek to protect their discoveries with
a patent. Many scientists, however, do not like to expose their work until it is
completed. This group of users will not adopt the open-notebook science
approach willingly.
A technical disadvantage of many Web-based notebooks is that the included
data are made available as dead images. Links can be provided to a chemically
aware object, but this is undesirable because it introduces a point of weakness,
as the integrity of a link has to be maintained. A signifi cant feature of ELNs
is that they make it possible to base the next experiment on previous work.
That work need not belong to you. The availability of the data electronically
means that queries can be posed that will retrieve work similar or identical to
that planned for the next experiment. Rather than laboriously copying the
work into the notebook, a process that is both time consuming and error prone,
the scientist can copy or clone the previous experiment, modify the details,
and start executing the experiment. In such circumstances it is useful to retain
the link back to the original work so that the system can develop metrics on
most cloned work. Such experimental procedures can then acquire a quality
standard. Apart from the improved likelihood that the experiment will be
successful, much time is saved and that reduces costs signifi cantly.
Open-notebook science does, however, demonstrate that collaboration
is practical and, truly interactive ELNs being possible, a company could
exploit the approach within its fi rewall or installed in a cloud computing
environment.
19.10
SMART TEA
The SmartTea project [15] was predicated on a simple (very British) idea: how
to describe the preparation of the perfect cup of tea in a manner that allowed
a second user to replicate the work. While the task seems simple, capturing all
the requirements in a concise and unambiguous manner proved a challenge.
Variability in the write-up and variability in the interpretation of the written
procedure lead to much irreproducibility in the output. With a variety of chem-
ists and computer scientists the process led to a shared understanding of the
diffi culty of the task. An ontology was developed that enabled the information
to be translated in a machine-understandable format [16].
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