Experiences with Repositories & Blogs in Laboratories

Abstract

An important aspect of scientific research is concerned with laboratory experimentation, data collection and data sharing for analysis. The Institutional Repository (IR) community has been concerned with the dissemination of experimental descriptions (in the form of articles) and now, more recently the dissemination of finalised experimental results (in Institutional Data Repositories) to supplement the IR documents & papers. This paper describes the R4L project whose aim was to address the gap between the actual experiments and the publication of papers. Importantly this includes the infrastructure required to disseminate results while affirming priority (the scientific claim of being the first to achieve, a claim currently supported by publication dates and appropriately counter- signed log books). This follows on from the consideration of the documentation of the experimental procedures, the experimental workflow, the results collected and the analyses performed, which eventually becomes a journal paper.