OWW Lab Notebook

Opportunity
OWW Lab Notebook, version 3.0

Analysis / Rationale
As version 1.0 of the OWW Lab Notebook has demonstrated, there is a desire/need within the community to enter and maintain research data in an online lab notebook.

Enthusiasm for online notebooks ranges from intense: "I want the paper lab notebook to vanish as quickly as possible! My lab currently uses our private wiki hosted by OWW for 100% or our lab notebooks", to lukewarm: "paper notebooks are more supportive of truly informal and flexible notation styles", to guarded (mainly about the openness): "My collaborators are not as familiar with open science as I am, and I think it would take a lot of convincing to have them agree to doing it all in public."

Access control appears to be one of the gating factors for online notebook acceptance. If one of our goals is to get a critical mass of researchers using the notebook, I think we need to offer privacy settings. We can set the default to be "share all" and force the users to turn on access control where it would make them feel more comfortable.

Another gating factor is user experience. We need to take a more formal approach to user testing and usability to determine what the next notebook release should look like.

Communities served
Level 1: Lab and collaborators

Level 2: Department/Institution

Level 3: Research community/World

Strategy and usage
Level 1: The notebook. This is the level where most of the LN activity takes place.

Technical strategy:

Level 2: Mechanisms for pushing content out of notebooks and into a publishing stream Offer templates to help researchers move material from their notebooks into a manuscript for publication...

Technical strategy:

Level 3:

Technical strategy: