Team Policies, Standards, and Guidelines
This article does not concern the software itself but aims to ensuring your institute or research group effectively transitions to an ELN.
Unlike a paper notebook, ELNs can digitally represent your lab rather than one person's research. Therefore, it is important to set usage standards, policies, and guidelines within your group. We recommended assigning a designated task force to test the service, implement it within the group, and maintain and update the group's use of the tool.
We also recommend creating a data management plan (DMP). The tool Research Data Management Organiser (RDMO) can help; see the RDMO instance at RWTH.
This task force (or at least one of its members) also serves as the main contact for the central support at the IT Center and can thus communicate desired features, problems, and so on. At least one person in this group must also be a Team Admin so they can implement standards, restrictions, and other measures in the tool itself.
Templates
Resource and experiment templates can greatly alleviate data documentation and also ensure that all group members document their work in a similar manner.
Team Admins can enforce the use of templates. Agree on standards for what information needs to be collected. This may be a group effort or an individual one, but those working with similar methods should consult one another to ensure their documentation is consistent to a certain degree. Furthermore, resources, such as devices, will all contain similar information such as manufacturer, country, make, and model. Including all of this information in a template ensures that no information is accidentally omitted when, for example, a new device is acquired.
Digitize the Lab
Start by collecting all of your lab's research data workflows. This models how information flows within your lab and how things are linked to one another.
Example of modeling research activities and workflows: Grünwald, K.E., Poster: From a data inventory to a data management plan (DMP), DOI 10.18154.
It serves two purposes in the context of setting up an ELN:
- Identify what needs to be recorded in the ELN (e.g., devices, software...)
- Identify which workflows can be improved or automated (e.g., automatically attaching raw data files to experiments)
Onboarding and Offboarding Group Members
New group members need to know how they are expected to use the ELN. Which read/write permissions should experiments have? Who is allowed to see what? What data should be attached to experiments?
Perhaps more importantly, decide how experiments will be handed over to group leaders at the end of employment. This could involve transferring ownership, exporting all experiments to an archival solution, or simply using the archive function within the notebook.
It is important to ensure that supervisors have full access to completed experiments so they can access, view, and reuse the information contained therein!
An exemplary set of instructions for saving a local copy of experiments at the end of a project can be found here.
Further Resources
- The ISA Abstract Model can assist in setting up a structure for your studies.
- ZB MED ELN-Wegweiser
- Higgins et al. Considerations for implementing electronic laboratory notebooks in an academic research environment, Nature Protocols, DOI: 10.1038/s41596-021-00645-8
