Working Group Charter Electronic Lab Notebooks

ELNs play an important role for many disciplines with respect to digitalization of scientific workflows. ELNs provide the appropriate environment to collect information and data in an early stage of the research data lifecycle (e.g. data acquisition in a laboratory and at large scale research facilities) and organize it in an annotated and structured way. They make a significant contribution to protocolling experiment work flows and  securing research results in line with FAIR Data principles through supporting functions for data visualization, storage, discoverability and re-use. The use of ELNs increases the efficiency and transparency of scientific work.

While different ELNs are in use by the communities of several consortia of NFDI, their adoptions to the work of NFDI, e.g. the adaptation to standards and schemes, is hard to achieve. NFDI4Chem and several other consortia added this challenge to their objectives but so far, the activities are not coordinated and a systematic approach towards the implementation of common standards to different ELNs is not achieved.