Towards open science: the myExperiment approach

Abstract By making research content more reusable, and providing a social infrastructure that facilitates sharing, the human aspects of the scholarly knowledge cycle may be accelerated and ‘time‐to‐discovery’ reduced. We propose that the key to this is the sharing of methods and processes. We present myExperiment, a social web site for discovering, sharing and curating Scientific Workflows and experiment plans, and describe how myExperiment facilitates the management and sharing of research workflows, supports a social model for content curation tailored to the researcher and community, and supports Open Science by exposing content and functionality to the users' tools and applications. Based on this, we introduce the notion of the Research Object—the work objects that are built, transformed and published in the course of scientific experiments—and suggest that by encapsulating methods with results we can achieve research that is more reusable and repeatable and hence rapid and robust. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.