Great presentation by Carole Goble that I found via Richard Akerman. In the presentation, Carole hits upon many of my favorite themes including data driven research, the importance of open data, etc.
I will point to slide 24 that really drives home a point that most people do not talk about enough; Methods are scientific commodities. From the beginning of publication, we have had a “methods” section in our papers. So why hasn’t electronically capturing our workflows, and making them available in some common format, become the norm? This could be done via depositing the workflows at a place like OpenWetWare, and computational workflows in a place like MyExperiment. Yes, there are cases when your workflow is somewhat novel, but you are unlikely to publish that anyway, so it’s a somewhat mooth point
Publishing workflows
I will point to slide 24 that really drives home a point that most people do not talk about enough; Methods are scientific commodities. From the beginning of publication, we have had a “methods” section in our papers. So why hasn’t electronically capturing our workflows, and making them available in some common format, become the norm? This could be done via depositing the workflows at a place like OpenWetWare, and computational workflows in a place like MyExperiment. Yes, there are cases when your workflow is somewhat novel, but you are unlikely to publish that anyway, so it’s a somewhat mooth point