OpenWetWare - a wiki focused on life science researchers

From WikiSym 2008

OpenWetWare is an effort to facilitate the open communication of scientific information including methods, results, educational materials, discussions and publications. In research, the traditional mechanisms for sharing work are reference books, journal papers, personal communications via conferences and invited talks.

OpenWetWare seeks to address limitations in these communication methods by decentralizing and lowering the barriers to information exchange among all researchers, be they professors, students or research scientists.

The wiki allows for instantaneous distribution of information with few constraints on format or structure. Simple, quick and easy-to-use mechanisms for sharing information are essential if we expect scientists to share the many details underlying the research process.

Demonstration/Poster will feature:

A large part of the experimental research process is directly related to taking notes and registering experimental data in a notebook. Given the importance of this task, an online lab notebook was developed with features such as:

• Dynamic calendar with auto-created pages upon click based on templates. Monthly, trimester and full year calendar views of entries.
• One-click Lab notebook setup with auto-created pages within selected namespace and specific templates.

Other implemented tools/extensions to facilitate OWW researchers:

• LaTeX extension for ease of formatting documents, representation of mathematical formulas and more.
• Biblio extension for easy inclusion of bibliographic information stored at other sites.
• Embedded reference tags which allow pages to be citable by meeting requirements of scientific bookmarking services such as Connotea, CiteULike and also available in Bibtex format.