Getting Lost in Scientific Data

As a researcher I was very lucky to have great mentors and co-workers that were always happy to help me. They showed me new laboratory techniques and taught me I have to be very diligent with recording my scientific data. Over the years I performed a number of experiments, generated an enormous amount of datasets and various statistical analyses. I was part of different research projects and for each one I kept a separate laboratory journal.

More than 80% of published scientific data was lost in two decades and 20% of the unpublished data is lost annually.

As the years went by I went from laboratory work to writing papers, creating project reports, applying for grants and introducing younger colleagues to our projects. I spent more and more time searching for “this image” and “that graph”  in my laboratory journals and computer folders. This became very cumbersome when particular research was an effort of several scientists or even interinstitutional collaboration, as everyone had their own system for recording and storing experimental data.

It came to me as no surprise when several studies (1, 2) reported that more than 80% of published scientific data was lost in two decades. And the numbers are even worse for unpublished data; it is estimated that 20% of this data is lost annually, being stored on “some USB stick" or “some computer", completely untraceable and therefore useless.

Less than 10% of scientist are using Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN).

The amount of digital scientific data doubles every three years. For me having a laboratory journal and storing files in folders simply wasn't enough anymore to keep track of my research and as I started talking to others, it seemed everyone was struggling with the same problems. There are many vendors that offer Electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) solutions but less than 10% of scientists are using them (3), as they are either too complicated to use or too expensive (and often both).

In order to cope with this increase of data it is just a matter of time when having a software for managing your research will become a standard practice. More and more science funders already require scientists to have detailed data management plans for their projects when applying for grants (4). However having so many options makes it difficult for a scientist to choose an ELN, especially since none of them seems to be easy-to-use, safe and possibly free to use.

There is a paradigm shift approaching how scientific data should be stored. More and more organizations are tackling these problems and Splice Team is proud to be a part of sciNote, a new open source scientific notebook which is launching in January 2016. You can read more about sciNote project here and subscribe to the newsletter to stay updated.

By Klemen Zupancic, PhD

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