Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) and Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) allow researchers to efficiently document their work, describe materials and methods and collect raw and analysed data. As part of the DLCM project, we have produced practical guidelines on how to introduce ELN and LIMS in an academic research laboratory (link). Whilst these are mainly based on our experiences with life sciences laboratories, these guidelines can be easily extended to other research domains. In addition, we have also curated lists of the ELNs (link) and LIMS (link) available on the market, which can be used to select the appropriate tool for a research laboratory. If you are you thinking about implementing an ELN or a LIMS in your team or research lab, we have expertise in different systems and are more than happy to support you.
openBIS ELN-LIMS is developed by ETH Zurich Scientific IT Services in close collaboration with scientists at ETHZ. It consists of a LIMS for storing information about materials and methods used, an ELN for describing experimental and computational procedures, and a data management module for storing experimental and computed data. The recent integration with Jupyter Notebooks facilitates analysis of the data stored in openBIS. By also storing the Jupyter Notebooks in the system, connected to the analysed data, users can keep track of the complete data cycle. Scientists working with big data (in the order of hundreds of TB) can describe their experiments/computations in the ELN and use the BigDataLink (BDL) module to create links to their data, which potentially could be stored in several different locations.
- Data provenance graph
- Big data management
- Integration with measuring devices, for automatic upload of raw instrument data
- Data analysis with integrated Jupyter notebooks
- Changelog of all modifications entered in the system
- User management rights
- Interoperable, web based application with a central server installation
- Centralised and secure storage system for research data
- Access via standard REST API for custom applications
- Integration of external instruments or data sources with Camel (Enterprise Integration Patterns)
- High level of customisation to fit to all research laboratory needs
- High level of traceability of samples, experiments and scientific projects
- Structure and link research data with experiments detailed by interactive note-taking
- Management of different versions of protocols - SOPs
- Collaboration with group and user level authorisations to share/restrict access to research projects and data
- Sample management to keep track of modifications and usage of samples
- Turns legacy laboratory specific databases and inventories into one manageable inventory facilitated by excel file import