My Online Science Lab Notebook
In my current rotation, I’ve been doing a little self-experiment; the lab has a group wiki where everyone can post things that would be relevant to everyone else, such as protocols, lab reagent lists, etc., and I figure that my lab notebook is of interest to other people. After all, it’s not just for my own records.
Thus, I’ve been keeping my lab notebook on our lab’s wiki. I know that OpenWetWare and other groups have been doing the whole “keep a lab notebook online” for a while, but I’ve been skeptical up until now about the value of an online notebook. I’m a wet lab scientist, not a dry lab scientist, and so I thought that I might run into some trouble with data and such that I wouldn’t be able to put online (or that would be too cumbersome to do so). In this day and age, though, everything is electronic. The microscope takes digital pictures, I scan in pictures of my gels, and the 96-well plate reader exports plaintext files that I can process with Python and R. Everything basically has to be able to get onto a computer anyway in order to be written into a paper.
So far, it’s been going great! It’s nice to be able to access the notebook from home or from any computer in the lab, for example, and I don’t misplace it. If I have a contact on a particular project, his contact information is always online at my fingertips. I can even search my lab notebook, or cross-reference easily! I’m a convert!
Unfortunately, I am not an open lab notebook convert, for two reasons. First, I’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement with a company to use one of their proprietary discoveries, and though we’re allowed to publish results, I figure blabbing about it all over the internet is something I’m clearly not allowed to do. Second, I work in a very competitive, fast moving, popular field, and it’s very possible that we would get scooped. We’ve already had that happen once. Even if the likelihood that someone will swoop by our lab wiki and scoop us that way is low, any little bit can be quite detrimental. And because I’m collaborating heavily, and not all of my collaborators may feel the same way about open science that I do, I am unable, alas, to endanger their own careers by putting my lab notebook on the open.
I also think that open notebooks work best in small communities, such as fields with very few people that are all friendly, or a small group of collaborators. Or even a field that moves slowly enough that it wouldn’t be possible to scoop someone based on their lab notebook. I do think that small communities make it much less likely that you’ll get scooped, as people tend not to mistreat people they’ve met and put a face to.
But in any case, as god is my witness, I’ll never keep a physical lab notebook again!
