Abstract
This past November, the R&D Team Computing and Electronic Lab Notebooks Consortium (a.k.a. The Collaborative Electronic Lab Notebook Consortium) closed its member recruitment phase and moved into the next phase of operations.
The Electronic Lab Notebook Consortium's agenda is to define and drive the creation of broad-based, industrial-strength software solutions and standards for R&D and testing labs. The area of focus is R&D Team Computing, which includes functions for electronic recordkeeping, electronic lab notebooks, R&D project data management and collaboration systems. The Consortium will also specify and fund development of tools to make integration of existing applications into these systems much easier than is possible today. The ultimate end users of the Consortium's tools are chemists, biologists, materials scientists, engineers, and the associated information technology, legal, records management, and corporate intellectual property staff.
Scientists have long felt the need for electronic laboratory notebooks as a way to minimize the tedium of laboratory work. Currently, researchers often spend many hours per week capturing data in paper notebooks to document their work. Paper notebooks are just one part of a much larger system for managing records, data and documents in research and development projects. Scientists require flexible, open and interoperable software solutions for electronic lab notebooks and record-keeping, project data management, and collaboration. These tools must come from several software markets simultaneously. The consortium is pulling together the necessary pieces, which exist already, and use them in the right combinations to satisfy the Consortium Members' common requirements, and at the same time establish more software standards for open, integrated systems for R&D and testing laboratories.
Progress on these inevitable electronic lab software notebooks has been impeded by the relative immaturity of software technology and standards. Also of concern is the lack of education on existing technology and procedures to address the legal and regulatory concerns around electronic record-keeping and records management. However, software, legal, and regulatory experts in the top Fortune 500 companies now agree that practical and prudent electronic ways are available to address the concerns. Software and standards have matured to the point where global electronic lab notebooks and R&D team project data management systems are really just logical next steps beyond current World Wide Web, groupware, LIMS, and document management systems on the market today. However, these next steps require catalysis from major players to speed delivery of industrial-strength solutions that will survive long term.
The Consortium is comprised of global R&D companies, manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, specialty and bulk chemicals, biotechnology, agrochemical, food and beverages, consumer goods, and materials. The group is using an open, vendor-independent process to specify requirements, prioritize designs, and fund and work with the best qualified vendors to develop advanced software components for electronic notebooks and add-on products.
This international collaboration is delivering specifications for intellectual property protection using existing groupware, document management, WWW, and other automation systems used in science now.
The vendors selected by the Consortium will be building object-oriented, client/server applications for collaborative electronic notebooks and other specialized R&D applications to meet the diverse needs of its members at a reasonable price. The consortium is selecting and funding vendors to rapidly develop modular and highly reusable software components that support record-keeping in legally-defensible ways for regulated industries.
The R&D Team Computing Consortium is building on the work of the ERC, AIPLA, FDA, PTO, and other recent research projects done by agencies in Europe, Asia, and Australia. It is pooling the resources of major end-user corporations to create legally-acceptable systems and applications for R&D intellectual property protection and management. Software for groupware, document and workflow management, LIMS and instrument interfacing, chemical and biological information databases, the World Wide Web, intelligent agents, and integration tools are ready to be applied, in far more integrated ways, to this unique set of R&D automation problems.
Vendors will be invited to join the Consortium before the end of 1996. The vendor selection process will begin shortly thereafter. The field of vendors is still wide open, and the response from vendors of all types is strong. Vendors of base platforms, applications, and tools are being chosen based on: their market focus, success, and core competencies in the areas of interest; best-of-breed technologies; ability to meet the Consortium schedules and functionality; and other factors determined by the Consortium Members.
Vendors chosen will develop and support software clients, middleware, and base platform enhancements. The user-driven Consortium will provide the necessary forum for Members to provide feedback to vendors to ensure that the emerging products fit end users' needs well and sell well in the market.