Share your views on Electronic Lab Notebooks and win 2 nights stay in Barcelona

NL42 organisers of the Paperless Lab Academy have teamed up with Scientific Computing World to create a survey that explores the use of Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) software for both current and prospective ELN users.

As you probably know, Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN) are computer programs designed to replace paper laboratory notebooks. Among their benefits for the user and the organisations according to Wikipedia we can mention ELNs are “easier to search upon, simplify data copying and backups, and support collaboration amongst many users. ELNs can have fine-grained access controls, and can be more secure than their paper counterparts. They also allow the direct incorporation of data from instruments, replacing the practice of printing out data to be stapled into a paper notebook”.

Choosing a good electronic laboratory notebook software solution can become a difficult task, as an ELN should be able to combine the ability to “offer a secure environment to protect the integrity of both data and process”, as Wikipedia explains, with the “flexibility to adopt new processes or changes to existing processes without recourse to further software development”. The chosen ELN should also include a modular design to minimize validation costs of future changes, and should contain “fully configurable forms to comply with the requirements of regulated analytical groups”.

Electronic Lab Notebook

The organisers of the Paperless Lab Academy (Isabel Muñoz-Willery, Roberto Castelnovo, and Peter Boogaard) are very interested in ELN, so we decided to team up with Scientific Computing World to make a survey to gauge opinion on the use of (ELN) software and also to know how features, implementation, and pricing can affect the decision to deploy ELN systems within an organisation. Even if you are not currently using ELN software in the laboratory we would like your help to better understand why organisations deploy ELN software.