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Pity the poor lab notebook. Almosteveryone is publishing, sharing andsearching information in electronicform, from biological and literature

databases to blogs of their latest ideas. But labnotebooks are stuck in a time warp, still hand-written, on paper. Many scientists can barelyunderstand their own scribblings from lastweek, let alone five years from now — as any-one who has had to decipher the hieroglyphicsof a co-worker can testify.

We’ve been promised the ‘paperless lab’since the early 1990s, but it hasn’t taken off.Now, almost every laboratory is strugglingwith an explosion of data, much of it generatedby automated instruments. An electronic ver-sion of the lab notebook can fully integratewith all these digital data and images. But most

researchers continue to make fuzzy printoutsof gels and data tables, and glue them on to theleaves of their notebooks.

Things may finally be changing, however. E-notebooks are ready for prime time, saysDouglas Perry, a laboratory informatics expertat the Indiana University School of Informaticsin Indianapolis. New products are being rolledout across the pharmaceutical industry by agrowing army of vendors, he says, noting thatthe industry’s massive investment in e-note-books has helped the technologies to mature.

So far, academia has been slower to respond.But labs that have switched from paper say e-notebooks have made life easier, improvedquality, and revolutionized the way they sharedata and results.

At Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, bench

A new leafscientists at the Centre of Excellence in Struc-tural Genomics quickly adapted to their newpaperless lab. They are using an e-notebookmade by Stockholm-based Contur Technology.“It’s intuitive, and easy to get started,” says JohanWeigelt, the centre’s chief scientist. “People gotrid of their paper notebooks immediately.”

Weigelt says the e-notebook lets scientistsshare everything: “the bioinformatics, expres-sion data, sequence analysis and all the molecu-lar biology, protein purification, crystallizationand structural determinations”.

Pål Stenmark, a Karolinska postdoc, says hisco-workers find the e-notebook gives them easyaccess to each other’s results. “You don’t have to ask each other for protocols. You can readexactly what the other person did,” he says.

Knowing that others regularly dip into his e-notebook has also prompted Stenmark tospruce up his own note-taking. “You have tobe a bit more particular when writing; that’sgood because it’s easy to be sloppy when writ-ing a personal lab book.” And when you can’tfind that crucial protocol? “It’s also very nice tobe able to search your own lab book.”

Although the data entry ‘pages’ of an e-note-book look like a typical web form, they aredynamic not static. Once an experiment is setup, data is automatically captured and stored ina structured database, often alongside instru-ment settings. And where a compound, proteinor gene is mentioned, it can be hyperlinked tostructure and sequence data on the web.

Record-keeping in the lab has stayed unchanged for hundreds of years, but today’s experiments are putting huge pressure onthe old ways. Declan Butler weighs up the pros and cons ofelectronic alternatives to that dog-eared notebook.

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You can add notes as you go along, computeor analyse results directly in your notebook,and store those in turn. Once the experimentis over, click on the ‘submit experiment’ but-ton, and the computer gives it an indelible dateand timestamp, and you sign it off with anencrypted digital signature. The pages cannow never be modified by anyone, althoughcomments can be added later, each with theirown timestamp and signature.

It is this electronic security, and the need fordetailed documentation to protect legal chal-lenges to their inventions, that has driven drugcompanies to embrace e-notebooks. They alsomeet the US Food and Drug Administration’sstrict standards for record keeping for clinicaltrials and regulatory approvals, and may helpdiscourage misconduct.

But the biggest advantage of going elec-tronic should appeal to both industry andacademia alike. With paper records, vastamounts of data lie unused and effectively hid-den, whereas e-notebooks allow results to beinstantly shared with collaborators. The pit-falls of paper are estimated to cost the drugindustry alone over $1 billion annually in lostopportunities and duplicated research.

However, installing new software on scien-tists’ computers, and simply telling them to useit, is not enough. Most software needs to becustomized to the working habits and researchneeds of individual groups, which means aninvestment of time and energy.

Experience shows that scientists won’t adopte-notebooks, if it means taking on additionalcomputing tasks, unless it also makes their jobmarkedly easier. Software has to adapt to theuser, not the other way round. The Paris-basedpharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis spentyears working with a French software provider,Klee Group, to develop a product (now avail-able commercially as Kalabie) that met thespecifications its scientists needed.

Cut to sizeCustomizing e-notebooks is proving more dif-ficult in academia than in industry. Industryresearch groups are typically large and well-funded, with clearly defined project manage-ment and workflows, and generous IT support.

“Academics simply don’t have funds for soft-ware that needs customizing to their situation,and there are almost as many different situa-tions as there are labs,” says Robert Cannon, acomputational neuroscientist at EdinburghUniversity and founder of the Edinburgh-basednotebook company Axiope.

And experimental protocols are continuallychanging. But redesigning the pages of e-note-books, and adding fields and tables, usuallyentails modifying the structure of the under-lying database. That requires the skills of data-base engineers, a luxury few labs enjoy.

Apart from a handful of big internationalcollaborations that have database managers,such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, mostacademic research is investigator-driven and

small-scale. Academic groups are often scat-tered across disciplines, and are perhaps overlycreative in inventing different ways of working.

Academic e-notebooks need to includeuser-friendly tools allowing researchers to cus-tomize them without demanding computingskills, says Gwen Jacobs, who heads the open-source NeuroSys neuroscience e-notebooksystem at Montana State University, Bozeman.“Any system must be flexible enough to handleany type of data, and any experimental proto-col,” she says.

“The nice thing about NeuroSys is thatresearchers can customize their templates and build user interfaces without a databaseadministrator,” says Maryann Martone, scien-tific coordinator of the Mouse BiomedicalInformatics Research Network, based in LaJolla, California. Martone is carrying out an“exhaustive evaluation” of commercial andopen-source e-notebooks.

Although most e-notebook vendors focus on the lucrative market in industry, Contur,Axiope and Rescentris in Columbus, Ohio,among others, are bringing out products target-ing the needs of computer-illiterate academics.

And if you are keen to try one for free, youcan download a basic open source ElectronicLaboratory Notebook (http://collaboratory.emsl.pnl.gov). It lacks the cutting-edge databasefeatures of commercial products, but allowsany group to share notebooks online and createtemplates for data entry. It also has a suite ofdata-analysis tools. The system was built by agroup led by Jim Myers, a pioneer in e-note-books at the Pacific Northwest National Labo-ratory in Richland, Washington.

Besides freeing academics from paper, elec-

tronic notebooks herald much deeper changesto the way science is practiced. Blogging hastransformed communication on the web, andonce scientists start making their e-notebooksavailable online — if only to remote collabora-tors — there will be a revolution in data shar-ing, predict observers.

Rather than spending time collecting theirown data, scientists will organize themselvesaround shared data sets, much as astronomersdo, says Monica Schraefel, a computer scientistat the University of Southampton, UK. HerSmartTea e-notebook project aims not just toget paper out of chemist’s labs, but to get theirexperiments out to external collaborators assoon as they’re finished.

Track recordsSchraefel’s group is also helping the scientistswho barely use paper at all: bioinformaticians.“Whereas chemists have 400 years’ practiceusing a lab book for their experiments, bioin-formaticians, who do all their work on a com-puter, have none,” she says.

In bioinformatics research, software is usedto analyse data from big biology databases suchas GenBank and Swiss-Prot. The ‘results’ areoften strewn across thousands of computer filesthat the researchers struggle to organize.

“The strategies we’ve seen them invent tokeep track of their work are amazing — andthey fail,” says Schraefel. “It gets to the point,they tell us, where it’s easier to run an experi-ment again than to try to find the data. Great.”

And if bioinformaticians can’t keep track of the mess on their own hard drives, whathope do they have of sharing results with col-leagues? Schraefel is tackling this problem bybuilding unobtrusive software dubbed MyTea,which runs in the background and tracksrelated files and notes. The idea, she says, is to create “representations of work in progressthat can be shared” — in short, lab notebooks.

Whatever form e-notebooks take, some areconcerned about how robust archived copieswill be. “I'm very nervous about the fragility ofdigital information,” says Martone. “We canstill read papyri and stone monuments fromover 2,000 years ago. We sometimes can’t readdigital files from 10 years ago.”

But Stenmark points to the “disastrous” riskof losing a paper notebook, perhaps in the trainon the way home from a lab party. He sleepseasier knowing his e-notebook is automaticallybacked up nightly to multiple locations.

And those attached to their dog-eared labbooks shouldn’t worry: even the drug industryis reluctant to abandon paper completely.Although electronic digital signatures andtime stamps are now legally accepted, theyhaven’t yet been tested in a court case. So com-panies that have gone electronic are playing itsafe. After each experiment is submitted to thee-notebook, managers print it out, have theresearcher and a witness sign each page usinga pen, and lock the lot in a safe. ■

Declan Butler is a senior reporter at Nature.

Note well: e-notebooks like SmartTea (top) andKalabie are nudging paper records out of the picture.

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