MyLabBook for Your Electronic Lab Notebook Your Research Lab Teaching Research Methodologies Citizen Science Your Research Project
Your SAFE Research Platform or ELN
Sustainable … Build on the stable WordPress Content Management System (CMS) that currently powers over 40% of the web. The popularity of WordPress along with its open source license and the relatively simple code base make a strong case for the long term sustainability of WordPress.
Affordable …The basic WordPress CMS will always be free and open source because of its GPL2 license. Additionally there are over 50,000 free and open source plugin extensions for WordPress as well as numerous reasonably priced extensions that provide more sophisticated capabilities.
Flexible … The thousands of free plugins on the WordPress site and the robust ecosystem of professional plugins with extended support provide the flexibility to create a platform that more closely meets the private needs of a given research project or for a website for publicizing research findings.
Easy … WordPress is known for its easy installation process on the easy to set up LAMP stack. The multitude of plugin extensions are easy to install and custom plugins are relatively easy to develop. The vast ecosystem of documentation also makes solving most problems relatively easy.
Many researchers have found it challenging to afford a research platform or Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) that fulfills their needs in a robust way. Over the last decade, several research groups have based their ELN or research platform on WordPress, which provides the Sustainable, Affordable, Flexible, and Easy qualities mentioned above. For many situations, this open source ELN approach provides a more attractive platform than commercial ELNs.
The focus of this website is to provide researchers, educators, and lab managers with good documentation and community resources for building their own open source ELN or research platform on WordPress.
We are also creating another approach for creating a research platform or ELN based on Oqtane for additional capabilities. More information about the Oqtane approach is available at MyLabBook.info. Our goal is to make these two platforms interoperable by making it easy to transfer data between the WordPress and Oqtane versions of MyLabBook. This will allow researchers, educators, and lab managers to make the best choice for their given situation with the flexibility to move between platforms as desired without losing their data.
We call this approach of using WordPress or Oqtane for an open source ELN or research platform the MyLabBook approach.
You can read more in the
Overview of MyLabBook