Is your science ready for total transparency? Jean-Claude Bradley, a chemist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, works on the synthesis of new antimalarial compounds using Open Notebook Science — a practice that makes all aspects of experiments and lab notebooks publicly available online.

During a question-and-answer session on the Sceptical Chymist blog, Nature Chemistry associate editor Neil Withers asked him when he last did an experiment in the lab.

“September 3, 2008. While I was in Southampton I spent the day with Cameron Neylon and we measured the solubility of a few compounds in organic solvents.” The results are available online (see http://tinyurl.com/5j4wwh). Bradley continues: “We used this as an example of how people can perform simple experiments and report measurements publicly that are difficult to find, even in expensive databases. We aim to collect a completely public dataset of solubilities of common compounds in organic solvents and create a predictive model.” Chemists can best contribute to the world at large by sharing more data more quickly, says Bradley.