An electronic lab notebook (also known as electronic laboratory notebook, or ELN) is a computer program designed to replace paper laboratory notebooks. Lab notebooks in general are used by scientists, engineers, and technicians to document research, experiments, and procedures performed in a laboratory. A lab notebook is often maintained to be a legal document and may be used in a court of law as evidence. Similar to an inventor's notebook, the lab notebook is also often referred to in patent prosecution and intellectual property litigation.
Electronic lab notebooks are a fairly new technology and offer many benefits to the user as well as organizations. For example: electronic lab notebooks are easier to search upon, simplify data copying and backups, and support collaboration amongst many users. [1] ELNs can have fine-grained access controls, and can be more secure than their paper counterparts. [2] They also allow the direct incorporation of data from instruments, replacing the practice of printing out data to be stapled into a paper notebook. [3] This is a list of ELN software packages. It is incomplete, as a recent review listed 96 active & 76 inactive (172 total) ELN products. [4] Notably, this review and other lists of ELN software often do not include widely used generic notetaking software like Onenote, Notion, Jupyter etc, due to their lack ELN nominal features like time-stamping and append-only editing. Some ELNs are web-based; others are used on premise and a few are available for both environments.
ELN software | Language base | License | Hosted on | Other info |
---|---|---|---|---|
Jupyter | Python | BSD | Personal computer or server | Web application [56] |
OpenWetWare | PHP | GPL v2 | MIT | |
elabFTW | PHP | GNU AGPLv3 | Personal computer or server | Developed at Curie Institute, Paris [57] |
CFWPELN (Cloneable Free WP ELN) | PHP | GNU General Public License | Personal computer or server | Uses WordPress, developed at University of Houston [58] |
OpenBIS | Java, Python | Apache License 2.0 | Personal computer or server | Developed at ETH Zürich |
Agilent Technologies, Inc. is a global company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, that provides instruments, software, services, and consumables for laboratories. Agilent was established in 1999 as a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard. The resulting IPO of Agilent stock was the largest in the history of Silicon Valley at the time. From 1999 to 2014, the company produced optics, semiconductors, EDA software and test and measurement equipment for electronics; that division was spun off to form Keysight. Since then, the company has continued to expand into pharmaceutical, diagnostics & clinical, and academia & government (research) markets.
Symyx Technologies, Inc. was a company that specialized in informatics and automation products. Symyx provided software solutions for scientific research, including Enterprise Laboratory Notebooks and products for combinatorial chemistry. The software part of the business became part of Accelrys, Inc. in 2010 and then in 2014 this company merged with Dassault Systèmes. Symyx also offered laboratory robotics systems for performing automated chemical research, which in 2010 was spun out as Freeslate, Inc.
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Wolfram Research, Inc. is an American multinational company that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program Wolfram Mathematica, first released on June 23, 1988. Other products include WolframAlpha, Wolfram SystemModeler, Wolfram Workbench, gridMathematica, Wolfram Finance Platform, webMathematica, the Wolfram Cloud, and the Wolfram Programming Lab. Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram is the CEO. The company is headquartered in Champaign, Illinois, United States.
An electronic lab notebook is a computer program designed to replace paper laboratory notebooks. Lab notebooks in general are used by scientists, engineers, and technicians to document research, experiments, and procedures performed in a laboratory. A lab notebook is often maintained to be a legal document and may be used in a court of law as evidence. Similar to an inventor's notebook, the lab notebook is also often referred to in patent prosecution and intellectual property litigation.
Laboratory informatics is the specialized application of information technology aimed at optimizing and extending laboratory operations. It encompasses data acquisition, instrument interfacing, laboratory networking, data processing, specialized data management systems, a laboratory information management system, scientific data management, and knowledge management. It has become more prevalent with the rise of other "informatics" disciplines such as bioinformatics, cheminformatics and health informatics. Several graduate programs are focused on some form of laboratory informatics, often with a clinical emphasis. A closely related - some consider subsuming - field is laboratory automation.
BIOVIA is a software company headquartered in the United States, with representation in Europe and Asia. It provides software for chemical, materials and bioscience research for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, consumer packaged goods, aerospace, energy and chemical industries.
SciDAVis is an open-source cross-platform computer program for interactive scientific graphing and data analysis. Development started in 2007 as fork of QtiPlot, which in turn is a clone of the proprietary program Origin.
Open-notebook science is the practice of making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded. This involves placing the personal, or laboratory, notebook of the researcher online along with all raw and processed data, and any associated material, as this material is generated. The approach may be summed up by the slogan 'no insider information'. It is the logical extreme of transparent approaches to research and explicitly includes the making available of failed, less significant, and otherwise unpublished experiments; so called 'dark data'. The practice of open notebook science, although not the norm in the academic community, has gained significant recent attention in the research and general media as part of a general trend towards more open approaches in research practice and publishing. Open notebook science can therefore be described as part of a wider open science movement that includes the advocacy and adoption of open access publication, open data, crowdsourcing data, and citizen science. It is inspired in part by the success of open-source software and draws on many of its ideas.
STARLIMS Corporation (STARLIMS) is a portfolio company of Francisco Partners that provides web-based laboratory information management systems.
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) is a software company founded in 2004 as a spin-out of Eli Lilly by Barry Bunin, PhD. CDD utilizes a web-based database solution for managing drug discovery data, primarily through the CDD Vault product which is focused around small molecules and associated bio-assay data. In 2021, CDD launched its first commercial data offering, PharmaKB, formerly BioHarmony, as The Pharma KnowledgeBase, which is centered around pharma company, drug, and disease information for research, business intelligence, and investors.
Sapio Sciences is a technology company that develops software to support drug research and discovery processes. Founded by Kevin Cramer, Sapio Sciences has developed software products for laboratory operations, particularly in biotechnology and chemistry.
LabLynx, Inc. is a privately owned, funded, and managed American corporation that develops, supports, and markets laboratory information management system (LIMS) solutions. Its primary offerings over the years have included webLIMS and ELab. The company’s primary clients include laboratories in the agriculture, clinical, environmental, forensics, health care, and manufacturing industries, including government agencies. The company is known for introducing one of the first browser-based LIMS products in 1997 and being in the laboratory informatics industry for decades.
Dotmatics is an R&D scientific software company used by scientists in the R&D process that help them be more efficient in their efforts to innovate. Founded in 2005, the company's primary office is in Boston with 14 offices around the globe. In March 2021, Insightful Science acquired Dotmatics. In April 2022, the two companies consolidated under the Dotmatics brand with Insightful Science CEO Thomas Swalla leading the new Dotmatics. Dotmatics' software is used by 2 million scientists and researchers and 10,000 customers.
LabWare, Inc. is an American developer of laboratory informatics software, such as laboratory information management systems, electronic laboratory notebooks and laboratory data analytics. It is a Delaware corporation, with offices in Wilmington, Delaware.
LabArchives is a line of cloud-based electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) sold by LabArchives, LLC, which was founded in 2009 by Earl B. Beutler and Kirk Schneider.
A notebook interface or computational notebook is a virtual notebook environment used for literate programming, a method of writing computer programs. Some notebooks are WYSIWYG environments including executable calculations embedded in formatted documents; others separate calculations and text into separate sections. Notebooks share some goals and features with spreadsheets and word processors but go beyond their limited data models.
Project Jupyter is a project to develop open-source software, open standards, and services for interactive computing across multiple programming languages.
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