OpenWetWare

OpenWetWare logo, designed by Jennifer Cook-Chrysos

OpenWetWare is a wiki whose mission is "to support open research, education, publication, and discussion in biological sciences and engineering."

OpenWetWare was created by graduate students at MIT on April 20, 2005. Initially, it served as a private lab wiki for the labs of Drew Endy and Tom Knight at MIT. The site was opened up to allow any lab to join on June 22, 2005. As of April 6, 2007 the site hosted 100 research laboratories from over 40 institutions, including Boston University, Brown University, Caltech, Cambridge Research Institute, CNRS, Duke University, and many others.

In addition to laboratories, a number of scientific communities are based on the site, including synthetic biology (home), Mimulus (home), and the BioBricks Foundation (home).

OpenWetWare runs on MediaWiki software on Linux servers. All content is available under free content licenses, specifically the GNU free documentation license (GFDL) and the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license.

External links

• OpenWetWare

Mentions in publications

• Science 2.0, Scientific American Magazine April, 2008.
• The New Science of Sharing, Business Week March 2, 2007.
• Science in the web age: Joint efforts Nature December 1, 2005.
• Wikis: Lab Partnering Science January 6, 2006 - mentioned on NetWatch page,
• BLOG and WIKI your science Biotechnology Journal December 27, 2005. Includes OpenWetWare in a list of blogs and wikis.

Subscription-only articles

• News feature: WikiMedia (pdf), Nature Medicine March 6, 2007.
• YouTube for test tubes Nature November 23, 2006.
• Online methods share insider tricks Nature June 7, 2006.