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What ELN would you recommend?

I recently got the following email:

It seems that you have so many ideas, why you didn’t build your own
system?

I’m a PhD student, what would you recommend me to use as ELN?

THANKS
-hector

I had to laugh a little, because – have you read my ideas? Some of them are crazy dreams! I can’t wait for mind-computer interface devices and iphone/palm pre computer phones connected. So your ELN is simply you making ‘mental notes’

Anyway, since you’re a PhD student I would have to recommend Office Onenote. I love it as my ELN. The new Onenote 2010 (Beta), offers a second level of subpages now. The organization is good, and if you have multiple members of the lab working on the same project (and you can get them to login and logoff), then Onenote record when and who has written anything in the lab notebook.

If you were starting your own lab, a PI, or a lab manager. And you want a more powerful solution with less hassle to you, then I would recommend some of the other ELN software solutions. But as an individual or small group Onenote really is fantastic.

I can link to any file for analysis – excel, word, Prism (stats file). I can insert pictures, links to websites, searchs. I can search through my lab notebook instantly (as opposed to flipping through).

I recently switched over to Onenote 2010 Beta with my little group. And to be honest there isn’t alot of changes (which in some ways is good, if it was too different then people may not know how to use it). I’ll go into more detail later, but the best things so far to me are – the add layer of subpages (although I don’t understand why there has to be a limit- why can’t there be sub-sub-sub-sub-subpages?) and the user/change tracking is better. I can see any changes made by others since I last opened it.

Here’s a pdf (you can save you onenote pages as pdf for archive if you’d like) example of recent activity. PDFLINK

Happy Holidays – The new year…

I personally tried out the technical preview of Office 2010 and Onenote, but now that the Beta is out, I think I’m going to try actually switching my ELN in the lab over.

So hopefully the new year brings some cool new advantages…and not BUGS

Chek this link out for some my Master’s thesis work that was just published.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ppar/2009/193413.html

What else do I hope for in the new year…..
a brain-computer interface for my cell phone/internet/ELN device
win the biggest lottery jackpot ever so I can change the science world forever!
…I don’t know, maybe a non BCS, NCAA football tournament at the end of next year?

Going to SFN 2009 in Chicago

I will be at the annual society for neuroscience conference (this year in Chicago – hey, it’s better than the Olympics anyway, right?). Come talk to me about electronic lab notebooks or epigenetics or whatever. My poster information is:

The transcriptional repressor NRSF/REST mediates acquired HCN channelopathy in the epileptogenic process
Poster-147.7/I9
Session Number: 147
Session Title: Epilepsy and Channels
Date and Time: Sunday Oct 18, 2009 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Location: South Hall A

Email me if you’ll be there and I’ll come check out your poster

Office 2010 Review: ELN improvements and shortcomings

I’ll mainly be reviewing Onenote, but I do want to say that powerpoint seems to have some nice new stuff – particularly you can embed videos (man that has always been annoying, being on a computer without the right codec or something). The big thing (which wasn’t really a part of the technical preview) is the web app versions of office programs. They look to be very similar to running them locally. That could be a really big deal (since google apps haven’t done much since they were released).

Onenote 2010 ELN Summary

• Ribonnized: Hey, I don’t mind the ribbon, plus it’s very handy to hide and show it now.
• Organization: Multi-level subpages!
• SEARCH!! – a much better and faster search, plus search by date and author features!
• Quick styles – easier to make your ELN aesthetically pleasing
• Sharing and authoring slightly better for an ELN
• Web? It says ‘Access from everywhere, share on the web’ but I didn’t really see how to do that yet.
  • is Onenote going to be sharable on the web!!
  • According to this site – You will be able to synch to cloud (Windows Live), edit your notebook from a browser, and there will be a better Onenote Mobile app (which I know nothing about) THIS WOULD BE GREAT!!!!

Still wishing

• Embed already word, excel, … – why not? Why should I need to press a link and open excel files Why not be able to embed any application in a window?
• Separate user login – I like the authoring tracking, but wish you didn’t have to log out of windows
• Shared templates? not sure if this was addressed, hard to determine with the technical preview

Continue Reading…

Office 2010

Yeah! I was ‘accepted’ for the Office 2010 Technical Preview. I’ll check it out to see if it adds some functionality to my ELN.

The Academia Problem – Preventing ELN Adoption

I’ve been hanging out in the ‘Ivory tower’ of Academia for quite some time now. Trying to push my crazy/complicated tech nerd ideas. (These people work out complex signal transduction cascades of chemicals in the neurons of the brain, but writing into a searchable computer notebook is too complicated?)

We know that as tech in Universities goes, so goes tech in the world. That’s why apple gave computers to schools in the 80s, and that’s why software is cheap or free to students. So why is the electronic lab notebook working in reverse?

Interestingly, the bottom line that drives companies drives the push toward ELNs, efficient collaboration, and searchable results.

Ironically, Academia (which prides itself on pure research and rich collaboration) is actually quite insular in it’s approach. The whole process of publishing research in journals and aquiring grants does not lend itself to collaboration. In fact, collaboration has been heavily pushed recently in Academia. However, this collaboration is utilized to publish, publish, publish. And when you publish, you publish what ‘worked’ and what supports your story. What is missing is all the information on what didn’t work – so every lab has to learn on their own what doesn’t work. An ELN in a business is easily searchable and everyone in the company can learn from everyone else’s mistakes.

The essence of the problem is that the value of a network of ELNs grows exponentially with more users – and Academia essentially has units of 2-10 people that work by themselves and share only bits of information with the rest of the academic world (in Journals).

The best remedy would be to get rid of journals altogether and just have instant public access to everyone’s ELN.

Can you imagine!! All experiments tagged and searchable… yeah right, that’s a long ways off.

First ELNs need to infiltrate the system as it is now. The academic ELN must target small, small groups (like 3 people) and look to really add value to the small group. And, quite frankly, it needs to be pretty much free (unfortunately for ELN companies). However, Google is free, right. There are ways to make it worth the company’s time. In fact, a great step toward the super Academia ELN that could replace journals would be an online (or online/offline hybrid) ELN that has advertising. Sigma, Invitrogen, Eppendorf,… they would all love to advertise

My Guide to a ‘Nearly Free’ shared ELN – Using what I have

In progress……

Only 2 Things You’ll Need

Microsoft Onenote 

This isn’t really free (well it is for 60 days). However, it came with Microsoft Office (which most people need or get anyway).

Shared folder on desktop PC to hold the ELN Onenote folder 

We have a lab NAS (Buffalo Linkstation Pro) that I tried to use for the shared Onenote folder at first. However, I came to find out that the Linux server system running on the NAS does not play nice with some higher windows file system calls. The Linkstation works great for our Lab Shared Drive (for both Windows and Mac computers). But the Onenote notebook files, when open at the same time on multiple computers, must make some Windows specific file system actions. The end story is, if using a NAS shared folder doesn’t work, just share a folder on an always on desktop PC – it will save you a big headache.

Continue Reading…

Rescentris – Bad Business Practices/Bad ELN

I have recently been checking out more pay ELNs (to see if they are adding features not possible in a free Onenote type system). Rescentris is an ELN solution that is 21 CFR 11 certified.

They seem to have an OK product (way overpriced), but their business practices are horrible! They are relentlessly spamming their site all over the internet (which seems to be a common business practice), but on top of that they misinform and slander free ELN solutions. Heck, my blog was slammed by one of their employees on wikipedia (I contacted them about such behavior and they tacitly condoned it). I don’t even really have a free ELN (I just describe how I do it with what hardware and software I already have). The poor people who develop free ELN software are getting clobbered by such bad business practices.

I would have to give Rescentris a -1 out of 4 stars for being down right mean!

Wearable Computer – Wearable ELN

I know, I know, I have STILL not redone the ELN guide. But you know how lab researchers get carried away with their experiments – I will get to it soon, we just submitted a paper so I will (hopefully) have some time.

These MIT students developed a wearable computer that actually looks quite functional. Wouldn’t that be great (when it gets cleaned up a bit, and maybe a bit smaller) to be able to pull up a protocol or past results at any time and project it anywhere!? Or even really easy resource management - everytime you use a solution or chemical it could be quickly recorded (you wouldn’t have to worry about being out of antibodies or solutions!). Or take pictures of any step or something that looks strange….

Check it out, imagine the ELN possibilities!
http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-digital-six.html

Off topic: Synergy, Live Writer, and no more Groove

Before I finish up my new guide on how I set up my current lab ELN, I wanted to organize things and fix little nuisances.

Synergy

It may be a cheesy business buzzword, but it’s also a simple and wonderful little program. Synergy is a small program that you can install on multiple computers which allows you to use a single keyboard and mouse on multiple computers. The computers don’t even have to run the same operating system.

So I bought a cheap desktop off of www.craigslist.org, so that my undergrads wouldn’t have to wait to analyze stuff if all the computers in the lab were being used.

Continue Reading…