There are already plenty of open notebook and collaborative science initiatives out there, so why roll my own website?
To begin with, I didn’t find any ready-made projects which exactly suited my needs. The most impressive, and the one which came the closest to what I was looking for, is OpenWetWare, but its focus is on biology and biological engineering. Chemists have also gotten into the act with UsefulChem, which is hosted on wikispaces.
I did not locate any project of a similar scope or scale for physics or, perhaps ironically, computer science. The physics community is actually an early adopter of electronic scientific publishing, with its embrace of the arXiv since 1991. And the quantum community has not just one but two — count ‘em, two — whole wikis to itself: Quantiki and Qwiki. Michael Nielsen (the Mike of Mike and Ike, which is widely considered the standard text for quantum computation) has written an extensive post about the opening up of scientific culture.
Another reason for building the site myself, instead of relying on a ready-made solution, is the degree of control I would have over its customization. For a biologist or chemist, communications technologies such as blogs and wikis are only tools. But for a computer scientist, these technologies are themselves objects of study.
Following OpenWetWare’s example, I have installed MediaWiki (for wikis) and WordPress (for blogs), and I have also added bbPress (for bulletin boards) and WIKINDX (for bibliography management) into the mix.
Despite the fact that the name ★grads.net, which came to me in a fit of inspiration, suggests multiple grad(uate student)s, for now this experiment in open notebook science is mine alone.
– davinci
After I wrote the above post, I discovered BlogScholar, an academic blogging portal with a directory of blogs written by academics, and scholarz.net, an academic communication platform which is part of a research project on Scientific work in the Web 2.0. These projects both seem to be quite active, which is a good sign.