The February 4th "Future Tense" radio program on Australian Broadcasting featured an interview with Professor Dan Gezelter about his work with the Open Science project. The idea of the Open Science movement involves promoting greater transparency and sharing of scientific code, data, and communications. Gezelter’s research group releases all of their molecular dynamics programs as "open source" codes. "Good science is reproducible, and there should be a degree of transparency to our methodology," says Gezelter, "Simulations and numerical experiments on complex phenomena therefore require that the scientists who do the work provide a window in to how that work was done. The best way to make our methodology clear is to provide access to the code.
Jmol, an open source program originally written in Gezelter’s lab is now the default molecular visualization tool for the Protein Data Bank, ACS Chemical Biology, Molecular Biosystems and Nature Chemistry. Gezelter’s work on the Open Science project was funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The broadcast was aired on 2/4/10. For details and listen to the broadcast click on the link.