Collaborative Chemistry

It has been a truly awful week. A colleague, Jean-Claude Bradley passed away. I found out on Tuesday while traveling. I was stunned. We had met several times, enjoyed lunches in a pub across from his lab at Drexel a few years ago, chatted at Science Online in 2012 and on and on. I will never forget that he was one of the first authors I wanted to request a contribution from for a book we edited, and he and co-authors did it on condition it was freely available. Can you imagine trying to get Wiley to do it. But they did and this chapter was the first I have ever seen where every reference was a URL !

First question I asked myself was why have we lost yet another great person? Second question was why didn’t I just thank him for opening our eyes to open notebook science and just being totally open about science? For many it is probably about as radical as it gets, as the majority still hoard their data. I would say a handful of scientists have really truly made me rethink why I am doing science. Yes he and others made me open up more. I am not close to open notebook, but I am putting things on figshare, slideshare and trying more open journals. Perhaps a fitting way to remember Jean-Claude is to keep this going especially in chemistry  – push for more openess.

A great measure of the person is literally how invisible he was, yet he has affected so many that we are sharing our remembrances and the impact he had on us.

As I am a collector, here are some of these so far and I am sure this will grow as word spreads:

Chemconnector

Science 2.0

SteinBlog

Scientopia

Drexel

Chem-bla-ics

ScienceSeeker

TerraSigillata

On Twitter I started the hashtag #ThankChemists because I also realized without them I would literally not be here, I would be doing something totally different. I wished I could have thanked Jean-Claude personally.