And supervisors can monitor the activity of their teams remotely.īut there are downsides, too. Researchers can link experiments to specific samples or files, as well as share information easily with other lab members and collaborators, facilitating reproducibility. And thanks to templates, scientists don’t have to rewrite protocols. They are easy to search, copy and archive. (Last month, LabArchives announced a partnership with Macmillan Learning of New York City, which is part of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group in Stuttgart, Germany Holtzbrinck is the majority shareholder in Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature.)Īdvocates tout the many advantages of ELNs over their paper counterparts. For instance, LabArchives in Carlsbad, California, has sold campus-wide site licences for its ELN platform to more than 375 research institutions worldwide. And many universities have started to provide such products to their researchers. Benchling, an electronic research platform in San Francisco, California, has seen use of its ELN in academia more than double for the past two years, with tens of thousands of researchers now logging in every day, says chief executive Sajith Wickramasekara. Where researchers once questioned the utility of ELNs, now they are quicker to commit, says Simon Bungers, co-founder of labfolder, an ELN company in Berlin. “I do feel that we’re approaching a tipping point,” says Alastair Downie, head of IT at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge, UK.ĮLN developers say that they have also seen signs of growing interest. And the ELN market has expanded to include more intuitive tools, such as cloud-based products, which are easier to adopt than those requiring information technology (IT) support to install. Concerns over reproducibility, as well as more stringent requirements on data management from funding agencies, have motivated improvements in the documentation of lab work. Recent trends in research have also created a demand for such changes: as scientists deal with increasing volumes of data, gluing printed results into a paper notebook becomes more archaic. ![]() “It does become very confusing.” And many researchers simply lack the time or motivation to make the move to ELNs.īut today’s early-career researchers, who have grown up with digital technology, tend to expect - and to embrace - electronic solutions. “It’s just insane,” says Sian Jones, a petroleum engineer at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. ![]() But the ELN market encompasses considerable variety a study conducted in 2016 by the University of Southampton, UK, identified 72 active products ( S. ELNs comprise software that helps researchers to document experiments, and that often has features such as protocol templates, collaboration tools, support for electronic signatures and the ability to manage the lab inventory. One barrier to uptake is the wide range of products available. It has yet to happen - but more and more scientists are taking the plunge. Since at least the 1990s, articles on technology have predicted the imminent, widespread adoption of electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) by researchers.
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