Open science notebooks: New insights, new affordances

Abstract

New media have had a profound impact on the way scientists access, carry out and communicate their research. Driven by the impetus of the Open Science movement, some researchers have put their laboratory notebook online, providing access to this occluded and largely unexplored research genre. Drawing on the notion of the adaptability of language, this paper proposes a case-study of an online genomics notebook from two perspectives, inter-generic and intra-generic. We first investigate the considerable adaptation that takes place when the record of experimental work in the notebook is shaped into a public research claim in the downstream research article genre, focusing on utterer-interpreter relations and the immediacy of the notebook vs the decontextualized reconstruction of the article. We then investigate how migration to the web also results in adaptation by comparing the online notebook with the traditional paper notebooks used in science labs. The comparison shows that the online version places more emphasis on emotive elements and that its language and presentational features are more informal. We conclude with some comments on the metapragmatic awareness of the author of the online notebook as he navigates between these different genres and media.