Journal
JOURNAL OF CHEMINFORMATICS
Volume 9, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
BMC
DOI: 10.1186/s13321-017-0221-3
Keywords
Electronic lab notebooks (ELNs); Notebooking software; Cloud; Semantic web; Scientific software
Categories
Funding
- Web Science Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Southampton - UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/G036926/1]
- Digital Economy IT as a Utility Network + [EP/K003569/1]
- South East Regional e-Research Consortium [EP/F05811X/1]
- PLATFORM: End-to-End pipeline for chemical information: from the laboratory to literature and back again [EP/C008863/1]
- BioSistemika LLC as a part of their ELN market research
- [EP/H034447/1]
- [EP/K004840/1]
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [1383092] Funding Source: researchfish
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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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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