Accelerating Time to Experiment – the myExperiment approach to Open Science

myExperiment has set out to provide the social software and services to support the scientific process, focusing on the ‘time to experiment’ phase of the scholarly knowledge cycle rather than the data deluge from new experimental techniques. In the context of open science this phase is also experiencing a deluge of scientific objects – not just data but protocols, methods and the new artefacts of digital science such as workflows, provenance records and ontologies. myExperiment has already demonstrated the role of a social web site in addressing this challenge, with significant usage in the first few months of the service. In this paper we consider the second way in which myExperiment undertakes to reduce time-to-experiment – by integrating with the everyday work practices of scientists.