Putting protocols online
Online methods share insider tricks : Nature
This is such a good idea. It is always about the voodoo:
Perhaps more importantly, it is the subtle variations — the deftness of touch, the type of mixing tube, and a dash of hocus-pocus — that distinguish a successful experiment from a flop. But such details often exist only as scrawled footnotes or collective laboratory wisdom. “The art of the science really is not present in many of these protocols,” says geneticist Garry Nolan of Stanford University, California, who has put his protocols online. “They don’t tell people what the voodoo is.”
The websites could help share the voodoo. They are loosely based on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which lets users edit each other’s entries. Unlike the protocols already available online, the idea is to create a repository of experiments and the tricks needed to do them, and allow users to add their own.