Open Notebook Science Challenge

The Open Notebook Science Challenge is a crowdsourcing research project which collects measurements of the non-aqueous solubility of organic compounds and publishes these as open data; findings are reported in an open notebook science manner. Although anyone may contribute research data, the competition is only open to post-secondary students in the US and UK.
The challenge in turn forms part of the UsefulChem project, an ongoing open notebook science effort to synthesize and screen potential new anti-malarial drugs. Data from the Solubility Challenge will be used to build predictive computational models of solubility for use in optimising syntheses.
The challenge began on September 28, 2008 and, as of February 2014, involves researchers and their students from at least 4 different institutions and has resulted in the acquisition of over 7672 solubility measurements.
01Prizes
To encourage participation, each month an award is given to the student who does, in the opinion of the judges, the best work. In order to participate, students have to be a US or UK resident. The award is a US$500 cash prize. The first three winners also received a year's subscription to the journal Nature. The awards are sponsored by Submeta and Nature.

02Request an experiment
As well as concentrating on compounds related to the Ugi reaction, the ONSchallenge allows anyone to request a solubility measurement experiment.
03Chemical donations
Sigma Aldrich is also an official sponsor of the Open Notebook Science Challenge. Sigma Aldrich is participating by donating and shipping requested chemicals to any experimenters in the US or UK for free.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Open Notebook Science Challenge”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- PCAChemicalSpace.png by Unknown author, CC-BY-SA-3.0
- DescriptorChemicalSpace.png by Unknown author, CC-BY-SA-3.0
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