ELNs eliminate the need for manual transcription and can be used by distributed groups, facilitate managing notes, and simplify the inclusion and curation of digital resources (e.g. ĮLNs offer significant benefits to researchers by facilitating long-term storage, reproducibility, and enhanced availability of experiment records across multiple devices, ensuring standard operating procedure compliance and providing interfaces to instrumentation, supporting IP protection, collaboration, and open science. Electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) are also transforming the way that the scientific record is captured with a revolutionary transformation from paper notebooks to the digital capture of experiments. Within the lab, instruments are mostly computer controlled computers are the main tools for capturing, analysing, and annotating data. They facilitate interactive computation, electronic communication, multimedia, and digital information management. Computers enable a myriad of functions that benefit researchers/scientists, they can be searched, shared, easily backed up, and readily accessed. ĭigital Technologies are shaping the way experiments are performed, results captured, and findings disseminated. Historically the paper laboratory notebook and the scientific paper have been at the centre of this scientific communication however this is being slowly replaced by the arrival of digital technologies and the Internet and the Web in particular. The scientific record can act as a legally binding record that protects intellectual property (IP). Researchers may work alone, but their research is of little value to the scientific community if it isn’t disseminated. Ideas need to be shared, evidence disseminated, plans discussed, findings recorded, and errors corrected. In scientific research, communication is essential between researchers, funding bodies, industry, and members of the public. In this paper we present our extensive research and user study results to propose an ELN built upon a pre-existing cloud notebook platform that makes use of accessible popular scientific software and semantic web technologies to help overcome the identified barriers to adoption. Evidence suggests that whilst scientists willingly make use of generic notebooking software, spreadsheets and other general office and scientific tools to aid their work, current ELNs are lacking in the required functionality to meet the needs of the researchers. The main issues identified are the cost of the current available ELNs, their ease of use (or lack of it) and their accessibility issues across different devices and operating systems. Countless electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) have been created in an attempt to digitise record keeping processes in the lab, but none of them have become a ‘key player’ in the ELN market, due to the many adoption barriers that have been identified in previous research and further explored in the user studies presented here. Despite the increasingly digital nature of society there are some areas of research that remain firmly rooted in the past in this case the laboratory notebook, the last remaining paper component of an experiment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |