A good-quality ELN can:

• Store ANY amount of digital information in ANY format from ANY source.
• Facilitate secure, regulated collaboration and interaction between workers in the same lab or on opposite sides of the world.
• Serve as a centralized, one-stop location for all documents, literature, protocols, grants, and in-progress or completed publications, dissertation chapters and raw data.
• Create templates for frequently repeated experiments and procedures making training and oversight of assistants easy and efficient.
• Protect data acquired from human-subjects studies, medical research or other areas where confidentiality and security are required.
• Prevent data from “walking away” from your lab.
• Keep all of your data in a form that will let you present it as unquestionably authentic in any legal, regulatory or academic misconduct proceedings

- From OSU’s Digital Union article recap of the Rescentris visit, “What is an ELN?”

Ohio State’s Digital Union is a partnership between the Office of the Chief Information Officer and the University libraries.  The Digital Union’s mission is to expand OSU’s research, teaching, and learning capacities through technology. Readers can watch the video of the entire presentation, courtesy of OSU’s Workshop recording.

Watch a video of the presentation complete with slides and audio

Choosing computer software to use to as electronic data management can be confusing

Written by Isabel Fasciano

What is the difference between Microsoft SharePoint and an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN)? While both are designed to store and share data, thus fostering business communication and collaboration, an ELN has the added advantage of being uniquely designed to satisfy the needs of the scientific community’s workflows, information viewing, and built-in compliance with regulatory requirements such as 21 CFR Part 11.

Microsoft’s SharePoint allows a variety of documents to be accessed, viewed and edited by multiple users. Its features include automating business processes and workflows, check-in/checkout, version control, document organization, control of system privileges, and alert generation. With familiar tools such as the web and Microsoft Office, minimal skills and setup are required to use SharePoint.

Research organizations face this decision often. “It simply [was] not an option for NAABB to use complex product suites from vendors who are compelled to build custom solutions.  We knew that LIMS or CMS like SharePoint or Documentum would be too costly to configure and customize,” said Meghan Starbuck, Director of Economic Sustainability and Data Management at Danforth Labs. Starbuck led the ELN selection committee for NAABB, the DOE-funded bio-fuels research consortium.

However, issues with SharePoint exist. Certain features are available only with Office products; relying heavily on Microsoft limits the selection of Web servers and database servers. SharePoint is not able to comply with the regulatory requirements of scientific laboratories without extensive customization. SharePoint does not index all content, making the search for every piece of relevant data impossible. Data cannot be preserved from scheduled or ad hoc deletion. Also, queries cannot return all data, and complex, scientifically meaningful queries cannot be generated. Finally, the costs and requirements in building and customizing such a system can far exceed an organization’s budget.

ELNs also provide means to house and share information. However, unlike SharePoint, ELNs can capture and record experimental data. The data structure in an ELN mimics that of an experiment set out in a typical paper lab book, a device an ELN is intended to replace. Other differences are evident:

1. All data in an ELN may be fully searchable and retrievable.
2. ELNs are readily configured to comply with the requirements of a regulated environment, such as Title 21 CFR Part 11.
3. An ELN backs up data to prevent unintentional deletions.
4. Instrument data can be directly incorporated into ELNs.
5. ELNs can be standalone programs, use a client-server model, or be entirely web-based.
6. Scheduling options are available for such tasks as equipment qualification and study related timelines.

One leading ELN is IDBS’ E-WorkBook. It has one generic ELN platform, which promotes controlled data sharing across departments, sites and external collaborators. Out-of-the-box support is provided for Microsoft® Office, image formats and Adobe® PDF. Data can be exported to Microsoft Word with one click. Powerful search and query tools are available. Data can be viewed in different ways, significantly impacting discovery development. Its electronic and digital signatures are certified by SAFE-BioPharma, the pharmaceutical industry’s signature standards body. IDBS offers additional product modules for synthetic chemistry workflows and for bioanalytical data management (BioBook). There are platform limitations, however. First, support is only provided for an Oracle database. Second, E-Workbook cannot be installed on Mac machines.

Another leading ELN, Rescentris’ CERF, is able to work with any database and is installable on both Mac and Windows machines. CERF is compatible with Microsoft Office file types, and boasts other benefits:

1. The secure CERF server consists of a server application, a file system containing raw data, and a referential database. By separating the database and file system, CERF does not slow down as data accumulates. Data in the file system remains in its original, native file formats, allowing for easy data extraction. The referential database contains only information about files so it rarely exceeds 5-10 GB in size.
2. The CERF client software is free; organizations only pay per user.
3. CERF has simple implementation models and infrastructure needs and CERF requires minimal IT maintenance.
4. CERF is based on open industry standards, including W3C semantic web technologies, making updates to outdated modules and IT technologies, and additions of new ones, easy.
5. Any item, from tables, captions, and images to screenshots, documents, and voice annotations can be dragged and dropped directly to CERF, giving meaning and completeness to metadata that might otherwise be unsearchable.
6. Metadata is automatically generated and associated with every file and entry as they are added.
7. Relationships among experiments, literature and documents, and the evolution of data, can be tracked and viewed.
8. Change of user behavior is minimized because CERF works the way virtually all workflows and favorite applications already do.

SharePoint and ELNs both have their advantages. SharePoint is geared more toward the needs of the general business community while ELNs are more equipped to cater to the needs of the scientific community. There are also some ELNs built on a SharePoint platform; however, for most research organizations, these have the same limitations as SharePoint itself, specifically that without a rich and interactive client application, there is limited ability for scientists to utilize their own desktops and applications to productively conduct their work. Instead, web-based systems are more appropriate as reporting environments in which to upload or download data that scientists have authored or collected on their desktops. In conclusion, there are many ELNs from which to choose, and labs should make decisions based on many factors, including operating systems, types of research and workflows, and the level of IT support required. Two of the leading ELNs that each have their own merits are CERF and E-Workbook.

About the Author:
Isabel Fasciano has a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and a MBA in Technology Management. She has worked with laboratory systems for over a decade in roles such as systems analyst, systems developer, and systems administrator. Fasciano is currently the President/CEO of consulting firm Quality Systems Consultants. She is always seeking new challenges, opportunities, and learning experiences; visit her blog Thoughts on Laboratory Software at labsoftthoughts.com.

Redwood City, CA – Jan. 11, 2012 – The National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB) selected BioIT-award-winning CERF Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) software by Rescentris, a division of ELN Technologies, Inc., for NAABB’s data management, collaborative sharing, and intellectual property (IP) protection. NAABB received $44 Million in Department of Energy funding to create the foundation for a sustainable biofuels industry. NAABB featured CERF as a panel topic at their recent annual meeting in Tempe, AZ.

NAABB is a consortium of 30 organizations in academia, industry, and national labs including: Danforth Plant Science Center, Texas A&M, UO/Honeywell, Pratt and Whitney, Terrabon, Los Alamos National Laboratory, US Department of Agriculture, University of Pennsylvania and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This group combines expertise in algal biology, cultivation, harvesting, extraction, conversion, and energy economics analysis. A very ambitious agenda drove their decision to go paperless with an ELN to capture and organize their data, ideas, references, and best practices, manage document versioning, ensure rapid searchability and reuse of content, and facilitate information assembly for reporting and archiving.

According to NAABB Economics Director Meghan Starbuck, there were worries about ELNs being big, expensive, complex IT projects. However, “once requirements were clear, it was easy to select the Rescentris CERF system from the alternatives” because it was the only product compatible with their diversity of computers and users with true cross-platform support and ease of use.

NAABB implemented a single CERF server with workgroups and permissions configured to support the secure real-time sharing required for geographically distributed scientific teams while ensuring IP protection for commercialization. NAABB Director William Tyrala said, “A great challenge for us is to create and manage effective R&D collaborations. We needed an infrastructure and tools for centralized data management that enables researchers to share freely, but at the same time secures and protects sensitive intellectual property data. CERF helps us do this easily for all our notebook records and associated data.”

CERF is able to support the NAABB’s breadth of activities and workflows. CERF system administrator Jeremy Tate said, “The flexibility we have with CERF is crucial to the success of our research” and that it has been easy to manage, with no surprises. At their annual meeting in Tempe, AZ, NAABB hailed their success using CERF to stay on budget and on time.

About Rescentris
Rescentris, a division of ELN Technologies, Inc. provides CERF enterprise software to help organizations protect their R&D investments and increase collaboration and efficiency. The company serves a global base of commercial, academic, government and nonprofit research labs in biology and multidiscipline research areas. CERF combines Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) and scientific content management for a complete paperless lab information and recordkeeping solution. See www.rescentris.com.

Rescentris Contact:
Corporate Communications
614-436-6488
marketing@rescentris.com

Read our article: What is an ELN?

Consider the difficulties created in later finding or sharing existing research, whether internally through staff turnover or externally among an increasingly collaborative scientific community, when information is not recorded or tagged with uniform – or at least associated – terminology.  Many of these records are not easily searchable from the beginning because they exist either on paper or as loose electronic documents, emails, spreadsheets, images, and other file types shared over email from one scientist to the next. Divergent vocabulary compounds an already prevalent obstruction in research and development.

Informatics experts in the pharmaceutical and biomedical fields recently published a group paper on the importance of shared vocabularies in scientific research.  “Empowering industrial research with shared biomedical vocabularies,” (1) published in the November 2011 edition of Drug Discovery Today, is an article that expresses the semantic challenges and frustration common to many research disciplines.

“The negative impact of partial and missing vocabularies on industrial research is not a new issue” the article states. “However, in the current, rapidly evolving environment, new scientific, business and technical indicators suggests this problem will become even more acute…. A good example of the direction in which many are headed is provided by a recent biomarker study from Genentech that focused on samples taken from over 3000 patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Multiple genetic, gene expression, cell population and protein marker studies were performed by several contract research organizations (CROs) and subsequently integrated for the analysis. The authors describe how their efforts were hindered by a lack of vocabulary standards, with significant laborious, manual intervention required to match up ethnicity, study regions, drugs and drug types across the results.”

The authors propose that the biomedical industry should band together to produce a universal ontology for use in research records. Though time-intensive from the start, the article asserts that the rewards for such an effort would be widespread, including saving effort costs, eliminating redundancy, and more widely encompassing the available body of research.  But what then?

This is a question CERF software developers have considered from the start.

“From a technical perspective, the drive for integration has led many industry and academic informaticians to explore ‘Semantic Web’ technology. This approach holds promise in addressing major information challenges by combining data integration with powerful querying and inferencing capabilities…. Secondly, we advocate that vocabulary standards become an intrinsic element within industry software, whether they are document repositories, electronic laboratory notebooks or intelligence systems. Ensuring that the designers of these applications consider how they will identify concepts in a way that facilitates integration will provide significant future benefits.” Harland, et al 2011.

Coincidentally, our electronic notebook already does. CERF is only ELN platform built on these semantic web technologies and semantic controlled vocabularies and data standards from the start. “Technical understanding and user requirements are finally catching up with the need we saw 10 years ago,” says Dr. Jeff Spitzner, Chief Scientific Officer of Rescentris. Rescentris developers saw this because CERF was created by scientists who then developed a product specifically to meet the needs of other scientists.

Back in 2005, ELN industry analyst Mike Elliott of Atrium Research (2) said of our software, “One of the few ELN solutions focused on biology, CERF might be ahead of its time. Is the market really ready for semantic approaches to data management? Most companies cannot get a handle on their data and have a difficult time implementing a basic ELN system. We give Rescentris a great deal of credit for pioneering what might be the future of life sciences data management architectures. They are putting all the pieces together,” Elliott wrote.

According to Spitzner, CERF was and still is a “research collaboration and data management solution built on what the industry needs next year rather than last year to enable next generation product development work.”

1. Lee Harland, Christopher Larminie, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Sorana Popa, M. Scott Marshall, Michael Braxenthaler, Michael Cantor, Wendy Filsell, Mark J. Forster, Enoch Huang, Andreas Matern, Mark Musen, Jasmin Saric, Ted Slater, Jabe Wilson, Nick Lynch, John Wise and Ian Dix (2011). Empowering industrial research with shared biomedical vocabularies. Drug Discovery Today, 16(21-22), 940-947. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359644611003035

2. Atrium Research & Consulting (2005). Electronic Laboratory Notebooks—A Foundation for Scientific Knowledge Management, Edition II. 

Better organization, patent protection compliance, and modernization top the list of reasons given that CERF users wanted an ELN

Better productivity, particularly better organization, is the number one reason given by clients for wanting an ELN in their laboratories, according to our 2011 client survey report¹. In that case they are in the right spot, as electronic lab notebooks are reported to improve efficiency by 25% or more². Other major driving factors for implementing ELNs in research environments included regulatory compliance, modernization, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The survey was conducted among new CERF customers to discover what researchers themselves were looking for in an ELN solution today. Reasons given for choosing CERF over competitor ELN products included offering a comprehensive ELN solution, compatibility with both PC and Mac computers, our iPad app for portable note taking, and a reasonable price tag combined with a full feature set.

Top Reasons Given for Wanting an ELN

Productivity

• Organization and keeping records in order
• Streamline workflows
• Manage data in one place
• Improve SOP functionality
• Better management oversight
• Task accountability
• Document patent/time to invention

Compliance

• Witnessing notebook entries
• Timestamps
• Regulations
• GxP Compatibility
• ISO Certification
• Solid documentation

“As [our organization] is a publicly traded company, [we] needed to be compliant with regulatory agencies”

Modernization

• Get off paper notebooks
• Incorporate electronic media types
• Virtual corporations using remote collaboration

“Trying to get off paper and streamline the process”

Data Retention

• Employee Turnover
• Graduating Students
• Rotating Fellows

Security & Privacy

Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Why Choose CERF?

Overall ELN concept

• Combination of document management and notebooks in one system
• Ability to hierarchically organize data into Filing Cabinets, Notebook Collections, Notebooks, Sections, Pages
• Ease of use
• Forms-based entry capability
• Did not require Oracle

“Toyed with others… but CERF had everything”

Cross-Platform & Mobility

• Wanted something more than just web-based [platform]
• Staff use Mac OS (50% of responders use Macs or combination of PCs/Macs)
• iPad tablets to replace PCs in lab settings

“iPad for CERF [is] great in the laboratory because bringing a paper notebook into the laboratory is too dangerous. We bought extra licenses for those working in the laboratory.”

Sales representative / Support Staff

• Ability to meet deployment deadline
• In-person demo
• Training
• Understanding of researcher needs

Clients said they were “very happy with the speed the server was ready” and “post-sales training was excellent”

Collaboration

• Works well for multidisciplinary research

Customizable

One customer stated a competitor was “very expensive, too rigid… too document centric.”

Reasonably Priced

“Needed privacy and compliance with a reasonable price tag”

These findings reflect the real reasons scientists are choosing to work with ELNs in the current market. More information about how ELNs meet these needs can be found in our article “Why You Need to Buy an ELN Today,” which has other examples of solutions that ELNs provide such as minimizing financial costs and breaking the “reinventing the wheel” cycle.

1. 2011 CERF Post-Sales Survey Report, Rescentris, Inc. Marketing Department. Names/Identities of clients and competitors in survey responses have been removed in the interest of privacy.

2. “Lab Notebooks Offer Efficiency Gains: ELNs Help Companies Achieve their Goals by Providing Meaningful Workflow Improvements” Gail Dutton. Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News http://www.genengnews.com/gen-articles/lab-notebooks-offer-efficiency-gains/1951/

COLUMBUS, OH – Nov. 17, 2011 – Rescentris, Inc. today announced the release of Version 4.5 of its leading Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) software product CERF to its global customer base. CERF is a scalable cross-platform ELN used by organizations to replace paper-based lab recordkeeping and enable controlled access and sharing of research knowledge.

ELNs improve research productivity and quality by helping scientists find information and protocols needed to plan the right experiments, then capture and organize all of their data. User adoption can be a major challenge to the success of enterprise lab informatics solutions. CERF 4.5 was developed to be the easiest full-featured ELN to deploy and use.

CERF is the only enterprise ELN providing native Windows and Mac OSX clients, because users often need the full power and flexibility of an integrated desktop environment. CERF 4.5 offers fewer clicks for common and batch functions and a streamlined user interface to make it easier to organize and navigate through multiple projects and experiments. Real-time collaboration and communication was extended with new messaging technologies, so users can more easily work together – even on the same page.

CERF 4.5 provides new mobility option ‘Email-To-CERF’ to post notes, images and data securely from any device, plus an updated web browser ELN client. Data visualization was extended to create and edit even more scientific content inline in the notebook, including a free-hand sketching tool, audio entries and annotations, tables, mindmaps, and screenshots, as well as greater Microsoft Office integration. Workflows were simplified for multiple authors on experiments and notebook pages, and publishing to PDF or to Microsoft Word format was extended. New social tagging, user editable taxonomies, and metadata features were added to annotate and quickly find information using CERF’s rich search tools.

Version 4.5 updated the CERF Server (PC/Mac) for MS SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle databases. Distributed Data Management extends management of data and images of any size securely outside the relational database to maintain system performance. The new SDIMS module supports structured data and standardized forms, including experiments, samples, and task management (as semantic data in RDF format). CERF 4.5 also features enhancements for patent protection, regulatory compliance and monitoring.

The extensions and updates were all deployed within CERF’s modular and flexible semantic infrastructure that enables plug-and-play upgrades and the ability to control what features are available. See http://rescentris.com/cerf-software/cerf-4-5-updates/ for more information.

“This release was driven by our users in diverse disciplines at over 100 customer sites”, said Jeff Spitzner, Rescentris’ President. “They chose CERF because it has the feature set users want and is easy to deploy, maintain, and upgrade. Now, as ELNs are becoming mainstream applications, it is vital that they are easy to use, match the way scientists work today, and remain fast and responsive even as data volumes increase. CERF is a critical tool to help our customers make efficient and effective use of their knowledge in order to compete successfully in the global research and development community.“

About Rescentris
Rescentris, Inc. provides CERF enterprise software to help organizations protect their R&D investments and increase collaboration and efficiency. The company serves a global base of commercial, academic, government and nonprofit research labs in biology and multidiscipline research areas. CERF combines Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) and scientific content management for a complete paperless lab solution with data secured on servers hosted behind firewalls. See http://rescentris.com.

Rescentris Contact:
Corporate Communications
614-436-6488
marketing@rescentris.com

CERF is the chosen ELN for NAABB collaboration

Rescentris representatives are hosting a panel at the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bio-products (NAABB) Keystone Meeting this week in Tempe, Arizona. The panel will be about NAABB’s use of CERF electronic lab notebook (ELN) and data management system as the central collaboration portal for organizing their research efforts.

“… this consortium is comprised of 28 different organizations across the country, we needed a way for everyone to collaborate efficiently and effectively with minimal effort.”
-Jeremy Tate, CERF Administrator, Danforth Center

Partners of the biofuel technology-focused program will have an opportunity to ask CERF experts questions about our advanced software solution during the panel session. Other topics slated for discussion during the conference include sustainability, harvesting and extraction, and algal biology.

“We have been using Rescentris CERF for over a year now for the NAABB program,” said Jeremy Tate of the Danforth Plant Center. “Being that this consortium is comprised of 28 different organizations across the country, we needed a way for everyone to collaborate efficiently and effectively with minimal effort.”

NAABB is a U.S. Department of Energy consortium organized “to research, develop, and demonstrate biofuels production for transportation and stationary applications.” (naabb.org) The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and the Los Alamos National Laboratory head the consortium, which includes key partners such as Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

For more information about NAABB and the federal Biomass Program, visit http://www.naabb.org

We have been using Rescentris CERF for over a year now for the NAABB program (http://www.naabb.org). Being that this consortium is comprised of 28 different organizations across the country, we needed a way for everyone to collaborate efficiently and effectively with minimal effort. CERF allowed us to set up workgroups and file shares to share documents with whomever needed to see the correct data, enable global sharing for certain areas, and allow team sharing for certain teams. It is 100% customizable for permissions with respect to access certain file cabinets or notebooks. If you need a new configuration, you just simply create a new workgroup and assign it to the new FC (File Cabinet) or NB (Notebook). At the end of the day it is almost the complete package for the NAABB organization (I say almost, because they are constantly improving user features). The electronic notebooks allow for image integration, MS Office, PDF, and many other types of document support to your notebook pages (a demo from Rescentris would be the best way to see this in action). The metadata and search integration allows PI’s to search for data and find what they are looking for in seconds. The Rescentris group is also very responsive to any issues I have had as well as very receptive to any suggestions that we have either as admin or as users. In fact they just released version 4.5 which addressed many of the (previous) user’s suggestions and are already working on version 5 with more updates for to enhance the experience even further. They also just released an iPad version of CERF with many enhancements coming for it as well. If I were selecting an electronic notebook company, it would hands down be Rescentris CERF.

- Jeremy Tate, CERF Administrator and Help Desk Manager at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (DDPSC)

Review the CERF 4.5 feature list or contact us for more information.