GitHub as an open electronic laboratory notebook for real-time sharing of knowledge and collaboration

Abstract

Electronic laboratory notebooks have expanded the utility of the paper laboratory notebook beyond that of a simple record keeping tool. Open electronic laboratory notebooks offer additional benefits to the scientific community including increased transparency, reproducibility, and integrity. A key element underpinning these benefits is facile and expedient knowledge sharing which aids communication and collaboration. In previous projects, we have used LabTrove and LabArchives as open electronic laboratory notebooks, in partnership with GitHub (an open-source web-based platform originally developed for collaborative coding) for communication and discussion. Here we present our personal experiences using GitHub as the central platform for many aspects of the scientific process, including version-controlled recording of experiments, results and interpretation, data storage, project management, workflows, communication, and collaboration. We report on the utility of GitHub as an open electronic laboratory notebook for chemistry research, and discuss our experiences employing it with the Open Source Mycetoma and Open Source Tuberculosis consortia. By outlining its features and shortcomings through their implementation in our work, we demonstrate how using GitHub as a central platform can aid the real-time sharing of knowledge and collaboration, and further democratise scientific research within both open and traditional research models.