Attila Csordas, a researcher in molecular biology and biotechnology at Tulane University, announced on his blog in September that Google was embarking on a project, called Palimpsest, to store huge scientific data sets and make them freely available to the public.
Contacted today, Mr. Csordas declined to elaborate on the project. “Everything I can say at this point publicly about the project was published on my blog,” he stated in an e-mail message. He also provided a link to another blog post he made in September. That one advocated having scientists release the “dark data” from experiments that led to negative results. Mr. Csordas foresees Palimpsest being used for the collection of this type of data; its dissemination can help lead to successful experiments, he writes.
Wired reported on its blog Friday that the scientific data will be available shortly on the Google Research Web site.—-Andrea L. Foster
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