On FriendFeed, Open Science is a frequent discussion topic and I also get the impression that the scientific community at large is starting to pay more and more attention to the principles of Open Science, possibly in the wake of the Open Access movement.

As a proponent of Open Science, I've always had a bad conscience that my own contribution to the movement was so ridiculously small: I just tell everybody about my results here on my blog. Most of my data is acquired in a proprietary format (hand-written Turbo Pascal programs on an 386 PC from the early 1990s!) so making them available to everybody in a readable format would require some major effort.

Because I've been thinking about a way to make my research more open, we have initiated our new project with Open Science in mind from the very beginning (even though the scale is still more than modest, to be honest). A special behavioral experiment for the fruitfly Drosophila has been on my to-do list for quite some time now. I'm talking about Buridan's paradigm, an experiment in which we can test mutant or transgenic flies for defects in various parameters of sensory and motor capacities, mainly with regard to vision and walking. Buridan's Paradigm was first developed by Karl Götz in the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in the 1970s (see reference below). Now we finally have our own version of the experiment running! We want to make it as easy as possible for anybody else interested in such experiments, to build an apparatus themselves in order to run these tests either for research or for teaching purposes. Here's a short description of what Buridan's Paradigm is all about:



To facilitate implementation by other colleagues, the software not only to track the flies, but also to evaluate the data is completely Open Source and available via the project's SourceForge website. We used the Open Source statistical package R to generate the evaluation algorithms, so anyone can go and correct bugs or develop any of the code the way they see fit. Currently, we're in the process of building a database of raw data for male and female wildtype flies to serve as reference for other users in the community. The data are in simple text format, so anybody can read an analyze this data, even if they don't want to use our software for it. We will also try and digitize the blueprints for the physical arena at some point, so we can make them accessible to the community as well. If someone knows how to do that and in which format, please contact me!
With this information, anyone in the Drosophila community should be able to build such a machine and start testing flies themselves very quickly.

The latest high profile publication using an advanced variant of the paradigm was published in Nature and entitled: "Analysis of a spatial orientation memory in Drosophila" (News and Views).

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Karl Götz (1980). Visual guidance in Drosophila Basic Life Sci, 16, 391-407
Neuser, K., Triphan, T., Mronz, M., Poeck, B., & Strauss, R. (2008). Analysis of a spatial orientation memory in Drosophila Nature, 453 (7199), 1244-1247 DOI: 10.1038/nature07003