Teaching Instrumental Science Globally Using a Collaborative Electronic Laboratory Notebook

In the higher education sector there is a strong push to improve the synergy between research and teaching. To achieve this there is a need to introduce into the undergraduate curriculum the new technologies that support research practice and process. There is no doubt that future scientific practice will increasingly involve collaborations around data and information that is delivered via the web. Our students must be trained in these new developments, and our staff must have access to tools that will facilitate their ability to teach it. New technologies, such as the Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) developed at Southampton University in the UK, exploits the Web2.0 environment and offer the advantages of 1) being able to more readily share research resources, 2) as a digital record of experimental events and 3) a secure archive of data and metadata. We will discuss our initiative to extend the science curriculum in undergraduate chemistry through the introduction of an electronic laboratory notebook where instruments, experiments and data can be shared globally. The ELN is presently being implemented at UNSW, and the proposed project (funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council) will allow a multi-university (three in Australia, one in Thailand and one in the UK) exemplar of the ELN. By its nature, the project the outcomes will be available worldwide for tertiary science training. Keywords: electron laboratory notebook, science education, eResearch, eLearnin

The Open Practises E-Science Network (OPEN)

A grant proposal submitted for support to fund a research network focussed on identifying and dealing with the practical issues of enabling open practise in research. The text of the proposal was written by a large number of people and coordinated by Cameron Neylon

Academic Chemists' Use of Laboratory Notebooks and Other Information Management Tools

While the role of laboratory notebooks and other scientific information management tools have been studied in the context of corporate research and development, little work has been done to describe similar practices in the academic domain. This study aims to determine how scientific researchers in academia use their laboratory notebooks and other information management tools to aid in their day-to-day research work and if these tools effectively support their collaborative research efforts. An online survey of academic research chemists from four universities in central North Carolina was conducted. Subjects were asked a series of questions to gauge their use of laboratory notebooks, electronic information management tools, and collaboration practices. The response data indicates an evolving trend toward electronic laboratory data and notes; however, the paper-based laboratory notebook remains the primary means of recording experimental data and tracking progress

Collaborative development of the Arrowsmith two node search interface designed for laboratory investigators.

Arrowsmith is a unique computer-assisted strategy designed to assist investigators in detecting biologically-relevant connections between two disparate sets of articles in Medline. This paper describes how an inter-institutional consortium of neuroscientists used the UIC Arrowsmith web interface http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu in their daily work and guided the development, refinement and expansion of the system into a suite of tools intended for use by the wider scientific community

Chemical applications of escience to interfacial spectroscopy

This report is a summary of works carried out by the author between October 2003 and September 2004, in the first year of his PhD studie

How and why physicists and chemists use blogs

This study examined how and why chemists and physicists blog. Two qualitative methods were used: content analysis of blog and “about” pages and in-depth responsive interviews with chemists and physicists who maintain blogs. Analysis of the data yielded several cross-cutting themes that provide a window into how physicists and chemists use their blogs and what value they receive from maintaining a blog and participating in a blogging community. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for supporting scientists’ work

Chemical information matters: an e-Research perspective on information and data sharing in the chemical sciences

Recently, a number of organisations have called for open access to scientific information and especially to the data obtained from publicly funded research, among which the Royal Society report and the European Commission press release are particularly notable. It has long been accepted that building research on the foundations laid by other scientists is both effective and efficient. Regrettably, some disciplines, chemistry being one, have been slow to recognise the value of sharing and have thus been reluctant to curate their data and information in preparation for exchanging it. The very significant increases in both the volume and the complexity of the datasets produced has encouraged the expansion of e-Research, and stimulated the development of methodologies for managing, organising, and analysing "big data". We review the evolution of cheminformatics, the amalgam of chemistry, computer science, and information technology, and assess the wider e-Science and e-Research perspective. Chemical information does matter, as do matters of communicating data and collaborating with data. For chemistry, unique identifiers, structure representations, and property descriptors are essential to the activities of sharing and exchange. Open science entails the sharing of more than mere facts: for example, the publication of negative outcomes can facilitate better understanding of which synthetic routes to choose, an aspiration of the Dial-a-Molecule Grand Challenge. The protagonists of open notebook science go even further and exchange their thoughts and plans. We consider the concepts of preservation, curation, provenance, discovery, and access in the context of the research lifecycle, and then focus on the role of metadata, particularly the ontologies on which the emerging chemical Semantic Web will depend. Among our conclusions, we present our choice of the "grand challenges" for the preservation and sharing of chemical information

Lab notebooks as scientific communication: investigating development from undergraduate courses to graduate research

In experimental physics, lab notebooks play an essential role in the research process. For all of the ubiquity of lab notebooks, little formal attention has been paid to addressing what is considered `best practice' for scientific documentation and how researchers come to learn these practices in experimental physics. Using interviews with practicing researchers, namely physics graduate students, we explore the different experiences researchers had in learning how to effectively use a notebook for scientific documentation. We find that very few of those interviewed thought that their undergraduate lab classes successfully taught them the benefit of maintaining a lab notebook. Most described training in lab notebook use as either ineffective or outright missing from their undergraduate lab course experience. Furthermore, a large majority of those interviewed explained that they did not receive any formal training in maintaining a lab notebook during their graduate school experience and received little to no feedback from their advisors on these records. Many of the interviewees describe learning the purpose of, and how to maintain, these kinds of lab records only after having a period of trial and error, having already started doing research in their graduate program. Despite the central role of scientific documentation in the research enterprise, these physics graduate students did not gain skills in documentation through formal instruction, but rather through informal hands-on practice.Comment: 10 page