Electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) offer many advantages for researchers working in both industry and academia, including increased accessibility, version-control and improved data-sharing capacity. These traits make them particularly useful for collaborative projects in which researchers may be geographically distant but working closely with others.
Our aim is to encourage the use of GitHub as a real-time, open and accessible lab notebook and this repository complements our work on using GitHub as an ELN. We have designed this template repository for any researcher to adapt to their own work. Each tab; code, issues, discussions, projects and wiki, has a template embedded to get you started but that you can adapt to suit your style, preferences and needs.
To get started create a new repository for your ELN. Once you've got your own going, move back and forth between this template repository and your own and edit the content you find here to include all the relevant information for your new ELN! Our notes on what to include and recommendations are given as code. You can find examples of GitHub-based ELN's here and here.
We'd love to hear about your own experiences in using GitHub as your electronic laboratory notebook - feel free to jump on to the discussion board to share your questions, tips and tricks or problems you've run into!
First up create a README.md file for your ELN. Your README.md should include the following:
Provide a little information about the ELN owner/s and/or user/s and the projects they are working on which will be held in the ELN. Share links to GitHub profiles and other external website. Note when the ELN became active or if it is not longer in use.
Explain how a newcomer might navigate your ELN. We recommend using the Wiki as a central stop for visitors (don't forget to link to it) and linking through from there to other locations in the ELN.
Explain how your experiments will be identified. Please identify experiments in a way that suits you and explain it in detail here. See the two example ELNs above for some inspiration
You may want to keep the following text as is written as it is quite general and links to the more specifics through the labels tab
On the main issues page, issues are sorted into open and closed. Open issues represent experiments that are planned or in progress, while closed issues represent experiments that have been completed or abandoned.
Issues are labelled with labels that describe the aim and status with descriptions of these labels contained in the [labels tab](link here to your labels tab).
You may wish to add your data to the ELN pages or have a central location for all the data you collect in your projects. As a central location you can use the code tab which allows you to see up a filing system like what you would on your computer. We recommend filing data in folders names after the experiment identifier.
Whatever you decided, explain it here for those visiting and who might be looking for it.
Lastly, consider a [Creative Commons License](https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/) or similar for your ELN