Selecting and Using Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) Franklin Sayre, UMN Pharmacy Librarian
[email protected] See full guide with more information: https://osf.io/gq5vy/
1. Use what works for you
If you don't like using a tool you probably won't use it consistently. If you really love
using paper consider finding a way to backup your paper notebooks regularly. When evaluating
a tool use it for a couple weeks until you get a sense of how easy it is to use in different contexts/purposes.
2. Trust (but also back everything up)
There are a lot of different ELNs and new ones are being created all the time. This leads to a question about how much you can trust any given product to keep your data safe, to not go out of business, and to act ethically. When looking at products pay attention to who owns the product, who else is using the product, how much information their website includes about how data is managed and secured.
Why use an ELN? ● ● ● ● ● ●
Better recording of the process and outcomes of your research. Legibility and consistency. Auditing and authentication (control over who can access information; impossible to delete any content, timestamps, signatures) Easier collaboration with others. Protect your research from theft or accidental loss. Various time-saving magic like plugins to do repetitive tasks and templates for experiments.
Questions to consider when selecting an ELN ●
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How much does the product cost? ○ Is this a one time cost or a recurring annual subscription? ○ Will you be able to sustain these costs over the course of your research? What happens when you stop using the product? ○ Can you export the data in a usable format? ○ What is lost during export? Do you need to collaborate or share a notebook with others? - How will that work? Do your collaborators need their own account? ○ Who owns the content? Are you a PI with students working for you? Who owns the data on their account? What happens when they leave? ○ How granular are controls over read and write access? What type of information do you need to get into the product? ○ Just text and images or do you need other attachments like large data files? ○ Are there specific document types you use like spreadsheets or word documents? Can you edit any of these files inside the ELN?
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How much space do you need to upload monthly and store over time? Are there size limitations you need to consider? What types of computers and devices do you want to work with? Are these supported? What specialized functionality do you need or want? (Chemical structure drawing or searching? Inventory control? Calculators? Templates? Protocols) Do you work with sensitive data? What requirements do you need to follow? Does the product support you being in compliance?
ELN Options ●
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Evernote / Microsoft Onenote ○ Good for simple note-taking, working with text and images and average sized attachments. Work on many devices. Very user friendly. ○ Not really an ELN. Poor collaboration tools and auditing. No science-specific plugins or functionality. Open Science Framework ○ Free ○ Really a file-based organizer with a wiki and sharing/collaboration tools. Good for creating a shared workspace with others while working in other products like Google Docs or GitHub. Also good for pre-registering your study/analysis plan. ○ From the Center for Open Science, OSF's primary aim is to help promote open science and reproducibility but this product can be used without creating registrations or sharing your data ○ Good granular control over access to different components, sharing, and licensing. ○ Works with products you already use: Google, including UMN Google; Dropbox; Box; Amazon S3; Figshare; GitHub; Mendeley; Zotero; and more... LabArchives ○ Free and Paid plans ○ Metaphor: traditional notebook with pages ○ Maybe the most flexible product (can be used for any kind of science), rich feature set, but missing some specific things some labs need like searching by chemical structure LabGuru ○ More than a ELN, also does lab logistics (inventory, storage locations, orders) ○ Can also track who is doing what when Elements ○ Primarily for Chemistry. BioChemOffice. ○ ChemDraw is built in. Can search by chemical structure and substructure.
Patent Requirements (I am not a lawyer but I talked to one once) ● ● ● ● ●
A mechanism to uniquely identify each lab member in the system; A way to associate files uploaded by a lab member with that person; A trusted date stamping mechanism (e.g. third party date stamp) to identify the time at which information is entered into the system; Safeguards to prevent tampering with information and files entered by a user once it is signed; File format for data storage that will not be obsolete or unreadable if the company goes out of business;
Also See ●
UMN Libraries ELN page
