![]() ![]() Professor Ray Truant, an established HD researcher at McMaster University, is now one of my mentors for my Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA) Berman-Topper Family career development fellowship. Data sets, materials, and instrument access are being freely shared back and forth, and I have received excellent feedback and advice from more senior researchers. The availability of my work has attracted collaborations with more than 10 international laboratories on my HD research. ![]() Sharing my work via the open notebook has helped both my professional and personal development. Links to the Zenodo and blog post are then shared via a Twitter post. In this, my aim is to give context to this experiment within my broader research project, as well as provide guidance on points for improvement and next steps. I then write a lay summary of the experiment on my LabScribbles blog, linking to the data set deposition, with the aim of reaching a wider nonspecialist audience. After I finish an experiment, I write up all the details of the materials and methods as well as all the data and analyses, ensure they’re in suitable file formats, and upload them to Zenodo as a data set licensed with Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The notebook format I have adopted is inspired by the groundwork laid by other open “notebookers”: it’s designed to be discoverable, accessible, clear, and detailed in its presentation, and to permit dialogue between readers and me, and to pave the way for collaborations. Image adapted from DataBase Center for Life Science (DBCLS), 201705 Scientist bench F. Open notebooks drastically reduce the time frame from bench to publication in the public domain. My specific aim was to create an open and collaborative network of researchers focused on answering some of the critical questions of HD protein biochemistry and reduce unnecessary duplication of effort. I hoped that by documenting my research project through an open notebook and sharing data ahead of traditional publication timelines, I would speed up the research process for HD ( Fig 1). Open science and open notebooks promise to accelerate the process of scientific discovery. Although scientists mapped the causative mutation 25 years ago, successful development of disease-modifying or curative therapeutics has not materialized as hoped. My particular research focus is Huntington disease (HD), a devastating inherited neurodegenerative disease. Piloting innovative open science strategies is well supported and is encouraged for scientists working within the SGC. SGC scientists not only make their work as open as possible through extensive data and material sharing but have also recently implemented an open publication strategy, in which all manuscripts are submitted systematically to open access preprint servers. I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), where open science is a critical part of the laboratory ethos. Starting my own open notebook for my postdoctoral research project was appealing for a number of reasons. Of those who have, many quickly abandon the practice or fail to update their notebook regularly or share it with restrictions. Despite the benefits of openly documenting research projects in real time, scientists have been slow to adopt open notebook science. In defining the practice, Bradley said, “It is essential that all of the information available to the researchers to make their conclusions is equally available to the rest of the world”, meaning that the notebook must be a complete and honest representation of the scientist’s findings. ![]() The term “open notebook science” was first coined in 2006 by Professor Jean-Claude Bradley, a Canadian chemistry researcher at Drexel University. ![]()
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