Abstract
The drive toward more transparency in research, the growing willingness to make data openly available, and the reuse of data to maximize the return on research investment all increase the importance of being able to find information and make links to the underlying data. The use of metadata in Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) to curate experiment data is an essential ingredient for facilitating discovery. The University of Southampton has developed a Web browser-based ELN that enables users to add their own metadata to notebook entries. A survey of these notebooks was completed to assess user behavior and patterns of metadata usage within ELNs, while user perceptions and expectations were gathered through interviews and user-testing activities within the community. The findings indicate that while some groups are comfortable with metadata and are able to design a metadata structure that works effectively, many users are making little attempts to use it, thereby endangering their ability to recover data in the future. A survey of patterns of metadata use in these notebooks, together with feedback from the user community, indicated that while a few groups are comfortable with metadata and are able to design a metadata structure that works effectively, many users adopt a "minimum required" approach to metadata. To investigate whether the patterns of metadata use in LabTrove were unusual, a series of surveys were undertaken to investigate metadata usage in a variety of platforms supporting user-defined metadata. These surveys also provided the opportunity to investigate whether interface designs in these other environments might inform strategies for encouraging metadata creation and more effective use of metadata in LabTrove.
Highlights
New ways of doing science: computational and communications technologies Modern computers permit massive datasets to be assembled and explored in ways that reveal inherent but unsuspected relationships
Not all data are of equal interest and importance
This study suggests that suicide rates among people given a positive test result for Huntington’s Disease was ten times the national average
Summary
The practice of science Open inquiry is at the heart of the scientific enterprise. Publication of scientific theories - and of the experimental and observational data on which they are based - permits others to identify errors, to support, reject or refine theories and to reuse data for further understanding and knowledge. Recommendation 3 Assessment of university research should reward the development of open data on the same scale as journal articles and other publications, and should include measures that reward collaborative ways of working. Recommendation 4 Learned societies, academies and professional bodies should promote the priorities of open science amongst their members, and seek to secure financially sustainable open access to journal articles They should explore how enhanced data management could benefit their constituency, and how habits might need to change to achieve this. This report is concerned with its impact on fundamental processes that determine the rate of progress of science and that enable the effective communication of scientific results and understanding It recommends how these processes must adapt to novel technologies and evolving public expectations and political culture.
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