Badges and Stars

The Open Notebook Science folks have developed a set of badges to help people label their work, ranging from "All Content — Immediate Release" to "Selected Content — Delayed Release". Like the badges for various Creative Commons licenses, or Tim Berners-Lee's proposed five-star system for rating open data, the biggest benefit of this kind of categorization is that it encourages people to think more clearly about what they are (or aren't) doing, and why.