Open research: How sharing can help researchers succeed

The Virtual Project on the History (VPHA) of ALD is all about open research, open access, worldwide collaboration and daring to share even unfinished work. We develop new ways of working and learn from our mistakes. Sometimes, we have found very good new practices, the collaborative updating of the ALD thesis list being perhaps the best example (see previous post).

In addition to learning from one's own trials and errors, it is of course interesting to learn from the experience of one's peers. In Finland, the NMR Lipids project shares a lot of characteristics with VPHA. Through Twitter, I have learnt of many other open science projects. At this very moment, a manuscript entitled "The open research value proposition: How sharing can help researchers succeed" is being prepared in the internet by Erin C. McKiernan and co-workers.
This manuscript is being written in Google docs and can be commented upon in real time by anyone. The open practice is very similar as in our ALD-history-evolving-file and many other VPHA open files.

I recommend this manuscript for my VPHA colleagues to read, both for the contents as well as for observing practices on what one can do with Google docs. We still have to start writing the ALD History Review (Item #10 in the VPHA Publication Plan), and we will surely be using Google docs. Can we learn good co-editing practices from McKiernan's example?

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Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA) - in atmosphere of Openness, Respect, and Trust