“All a researcher wants for Christmas is a Nobel prize! Three PIs who use Labguru have had their wish come true!”

More tales you never knew about Labguru... The team are truly international and hail from many different countries – Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Mexico, Ceuta, Argentina, England, USA, Germany and Israel! They have a lot of children per ‘capita’ – of the employees who are parents, they average 2.4 children per employee

The post All a Researcher Wants for Christmas is a Nobel Prize #digiscixmas appeared first on Digital Science.

For this edition we have interviewed Jonathan Gross (@rubp), founder of Labguru.

What made you decide to leave academia and launch your own business idea?

I really valued the freedom that academic research provided. I enjoyed the life at the lab, working with great people and running experiments, but I felt that I didn’t have the patience required to become a really good scientist, I was too impatient to see the results of my research. I came from a computer science background, where you write the code and you can see where the issues are. I loved the technical challenged in my work and overcoming research obstacles but I was always drawn back to coding. At the time a startup company called 37signals open-sourced a new web framework called Ruby on Rails and launched Basecamp. I started playing with Ruby on Rails in my free time (while waiting for my plants to grow) and I thought of ways I could utilize it to help research labs.

If you could go back in time and give your pre-startup self one piece of advice, what would it be and why?

I started my company pretty much at the same time as starting a family. Succeeding in doing both is a real challenge. If I went back in time I would talk with other entrepreneurs to understand the effort it takes to launch a startup, so that my wife and I could better understand the road we are choosing. Eventually it all worked out for us but it was rough at times. Running a software startup is a demanding task, there is always stuff to do, and even more as you grow. You’ll need to have really good communication with your spouse to make it work. You’ll need to be self-aware and learn how to operate with less sleep! And you’ll need to know when to stop – go to bed and get back to a problem with a fresh mind. Self-control is key to the success of your business.

Suppose I have an idea for a tool, or a solution for a problem, within the research landscape and I want to develop my idea into a business. What would your advice to me be?

Go for it! You have the best intuition and until you start you can’t really know if it is a great idea and if it will catch on. Ideas are easy, success requires dedication, hard work and luck. Know that you can control only two of these parameters. Your passion is the key factor for success. Talk with as many founders you can. Learn from their mistakes, understand what they learned from it. Use available tools to control and prioritize your work – develop a framework that can evolve over time, your business needs to learn how to shift priorities as it grows.

“I believe to be able to conduct reproducible research labs need to set guidelines on how research is conducted and documented. If you can’t read your team member’s handwriting, in his physical lab notebook, then don’t expect to have reproducible results!”

As the founder of a business, what are you most proud of?

I’m proud of many things. First would be my team, as on your own you can only take an idea so far. If you have a team behind you, that’s a great testament to your idea – that people are willing to invest their time into it. I’m proud of our users who bought into our vision of leaving the physical lab notebook behind. They are helping to shape how we do science, how we communicate results and failures within a lab.

In the scholarly communications and research tools space, it’s often said that people have the same conversations again and again, e.g. we need to improve reproducibility etc. Can you think of a particular issue that, in your view, people aren’t talking about enough?

The debate over reproducibility is an important one to have, but we try to look at it at the lab level – not at the publication level. I believe to be able to conduct reproducible research labs need to set guidelines on how research is conducted and documented. If you can’t read your team member’s handwriting, in his physical lab notebook, then don’t expect to have reproducible results! This discussion needs to start at an an earlier stage than publication, the problem isn’t just about the publication of un-reproducible results, it’s about lab procedures.

What does the future have in store for Labguru?

Labguru is evolving as our market evolves. There is still a lot I’d like to achieve with our offering to the market. We now focus much more attention on our experiment page, making it easier to do pretty much everything from one page, from typing in and planning an experiment to reviewing an experiment. The platform should make it easy to see the details of an antibody without navigating away. It should make it easier for PIs and project leads to communicate with the researchers on the bench. We work hard to remove data barriers, allowing faster data entry and linking the metadata with the physical samples. We have a great user base that provides us with key insights, so I’m pretty confident that going forward our roadmap is the right one.

The post #FoundersFriday with Jonathan Gross from Labguru appeared first on Digital Science.

For me, the change this year in Digital Science was mirrored in a profoundly personal way when, in July, I was invited to take on the role of Managing Director. As I’ve said to others recently, having worked closely with my predecessor, Timo Hannay, for many years, being asked to take over from this leadership was a mix of excitement and trepidation somewhat akin to the feeling you have if you’ve ever been given the keys to the beloved sports car of a friend or relative.Many of our notable achievements relate directly to helping researchers and those who support them to be more recognised for what they do, more efficient at what they do, and to be more innovative or more open. So, although a little indulgent, I hope you won’t mind this post looking back on some of the “good bits” of 2015.

This year has seen greater recognition of our consultancy team led by Jonathan Adams, who produced a series of insightful and illuminating analyses and visualisations. These include: two Digital Research Reports; the delivery of the REF impact case studies database for HEFCE and the associated collaboration with the Policy Institute at Kings College London over the analysis of these data; and, an interactive collaboration network and comment piece produced with colleagues at our sister company SpringerNature for the Nature Index.

One of the most significant innovations from Digital Science in 2015 has been GRID, our Global Research Identifier Database, which we launched in October. “Open” is important at Digital Science and so we were pleased to be able to make the core GRID dataset available openly on Figshare under a CC-BY licence. Originally, built in-house to support our portfolio companies and internal requirements, GRID contains 50,000 institutional names that are all derived from public lists and publicly funded grants in an automated manner with manual curation to provide a high-quality dataset. GRID includes unique, persistent identifiers and geo-location information across 212 countries. The database can be used to clean up or merge different datasets and allows the technically minded to do some really cool visualisations of data such as the Global Institutional Collaboration Network, generated from PLOS ONE data, which you can see below.

Across Digital Science and the portfolio, we attended more than 50 conferences on 5 continents. We hosted 20 of our own events including Digital Science Showcases in Melbourne, Wellington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and London as well as  our regular Spotlight events, Ada Lovelace Day, OpenCon Satellite events, Symplectic’s ever popular conferences in London, Melbourne and Boston; Altmetric’s 2AM conference and Figshare’s inaugural Figshare Fest. Look out for a chance to see us in 2016 – we always want to hear about new challenges and new ways to help you.

Our Catalyst Grant programme has continued to grow and we received a record number of innovative submissions in 2015! This presented us with the difficult but exciting task of selecting the winners. We are proud to have awarded Catalyst Grants to both TetraScience and Ada Lovelace Day. I am confident that we will see great things from them as they continue to develop.

Highlights from across our portfolio

At the heart of Digital Science are the portfolio companies and it would be remiss to look back at 2015 and not to highlight some of the product enhancements, collaborations and successes from their perspectives:

• Over the last 12 months, Altmetric has served more than 2.92 billion API requests and has supported at least 8 research articles. Altmetric continues to diversify and lead the movement around article-level credit and is now tracking attention around articles in The Conversation as well as including mentions from ClinicalTrials.gov study records. Altmetric partnered with Springer to launch Bookmetrix, a book and chapter-level attention platform. Sara Rouhi, Product Sales Manager at Altmetric, received the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s 2015 Emerging Leader Award.
• BioRAFT dramatically expanded its customer base in both the academic and private sector research markets with new customers and expanded services for existing customers. BioRAFT was another Digital Science company to see significant expansion in its team, with the addition of a new Director of Sales and more staff in development, product management, professional services, sales and marketing. In response to recent lab safety scares (some of which even made the mainstream news) BioRAFT released 12 new subversions of its application, which included functionality driven and informed by its customers that enhance laboratory inspections and streamline the biosafety registration and hazard tracking processes.
• Figshare launched the next generation of their research data management platform. An exciting milestone in the usage of Figshare.com by the academic community saw the number of public articles on the site exceed 2,000,000, of which 500,000 are datasets. There are more than 5,000 citations to the articles in Figshare. Among many partners who chose to work with Figshare this year some of the most exciting content came from The American Chemical Society, the Geological Society and the VIVO Conference. Figshare was also recognised as a “Cool Vendor 2015” by Gartner and were ifinalists in the UK IT Industry Awards 2015 for the “Best use of Cloud Services” award, for their innovative work with Loughborough University and Arkivum.
• Labguru diversified functionality and with it the clients with whom they partner. Large institutions adopting Labguru for all their researchers now include Jackson Laboratories and AstraZeneca as well as a number of academic research institutions, biotech companies and government labs across the US, the Netherlands, France and Australia. The Labguru team will be out on a number of road trips in 2016 so do look out for them on their travels!
• Overleaf hit the three million projects mark in July! If you printed all those papers, the stack would be as wide as Pluto (the planet, not the dog!). The Overleaf team has tripled in size and is now working with more than 80 Overleaf advisors around the globe. Through partnerships in the publishing industry, Overleaf is now in a position to provide manuscript submission links to over 10,000 journals across all fields! No surprise with all this activity that Overleaf received a Highly Commended in the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing and John Hammersley, co-founder, was named as one of The Bookseller’s Rising Stars for 2015.
• ReadCube continued its success with over 15.3 million users reading, discovering and managing their content libraries. That translates to more than 133 million articles being read in Readcube for a total of 634 years of reading time! The NPG content sharing initiative, powered by ReadCube technology, celebrated its first anniversary. ReadCube now partners with more publishers than can be mentioned in this post! You can read their full list in the ReadCube year in review…
• Symplectic had a very busy year, introducing three new modules, an enhanced integration with Figshare’s institutional offering and a brand new integration with UberResearch’s Dimensions product. They also added SSRN as a new data source, much to the delight of social science researchers. Rather impressively, Symplectic’s Open Access Monitor has already been adopted by over 25 of Symplectic’s institutional clients and the recent launch of their new Impact Module generated a lot of interest in the UK. Symplectic continues to attract a lot of attention from across the globe and 2015 saw Elements launched at the University of Georgia, Symplectic’s largest ever implementation.
• ÜberResearch, having only started their company two short years ago, showed impressive steps forward. The Dimensions database now includes more than 1.9 million grants worth more than $918 billion from over 150 funders globally. More than $236 billion of that funding is currently live and being spent today. This gives a unique insight into the research that is being done right now. Last year was the first full year that Dimensions was available to clients with more than 50 signing up, amongst them some of the largest funders in the world.

On top of all this Martin Szomzor, our Head of Data Science, Mark Hahnel, founder of Figshare and Euan Adie, founder of Altmetric, were all named in Information Age’s list of 2015’s top data leaders and influencers.

Here’s to all of the teams and portfolio companies at Digital Science and wishing the best to all of you for 2016!

The post 2015: A Year of Change, Growth and Innovation appeared first on Digital Science.

REGISTER FOR THE BREAKFAST SEMINAR

Are you curious about digitizing your research management workflow, but not sure what it’s all about?

Join Labguru at a breakfast seminar to learn how digitizing your lab can benefit your research.

The seminar is taking place at the Ideon Science Park in Lund, Sweden on November 17th. It starts at 09.00 but don’t miss the breakfast and mingle from 08.30!

You will learn:

•  What is an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN)? What function does it serve?
• Do you need an ELN, and if so what aspects are best for your company’s needs?
• Where does an ELN fit within your laboratory informatics strategy?
• How do you ensure adoption, what challenges should you expect in deploying an ELN?

These are all challenging questions, being asked with increasing frequency due to a lack of clarity in the market. Labguru will share real-world case studies and insights into how a properly set up ELN can open up new opportunities for local and global collaboration.

For more background information, please check the following links:
Going paperless: The digital lab and Do You Need an Electronic Lab Notebook? If you answer ‘yes’ to these four questions, you probably do.

You can also read a case study describing how Labguru has helped Swedish biotech company In vitro Plant-tech increase
efficiency and bring improved order and structure to its experimental projects.

Download the case study

[embeddoc url=”https://www.digital-science.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/CaseStudy_Labguru_InVitroPlantTech.pdf”]

The post Labguru Breakfast Seminar in Sweden – Learn More About Electronic Lab Notebooks appeared first on Digital Science.

We recently hosted our fifth and final webinar of the year, “Embracing team science in pure academic and academic-pharma alliances”,  featuring a panel of expert speakers discussing two major trends in research productivity that both revolve around increased collaboration beyond a single lab.

Firstly, there is a growing trend in research for international collaboration, and secondly, academic research labs are also developing closer research relationships with their counterparts from industry.

Laura Wheeler, Community Manager at Digital Science, started the webinar off, introducing the panel of speakers, as well as explaining their different backgrounds, before handing over to Xavier Armand from Labguru to moderate the discussion.

Xavier provided a brief overview of the topic at hand, explaining how the concept of “Team Science” is radically changing models of research, for example pharma companies are now setting up “virtual labs” with academic research groups, often internationally. Xavier also shared his own experience of collaborative research and the associated challenges around coordination, shipping, communication and logistics.

Dr Davide Danovi, Director, HipSci Cell Phenotyping Programme at the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine, King’s College London, was the first presenter to speak. As most researchers will know, the lab is a messy environment and tracing the different processes and workflows that researchers carry out is a real challenge. Lab notebooks are inevitably messy, but digital platforms can help improve storage, preservation, tracking, monitoring, sharing and discoverability.

Lab notebooks are inevitably messy, but digital platforms can help improve storage, preservation, tracking, monitoring, sharing and discoverability.

However, in Dr Danovi’s view it is very important to avoid duplicating work when using such platforms, for example by recording data twice. Unpolished and informal note-taking should still be accommodated by digital platforms, as it is by paper notebooks. There should be a clear and direct relationship between experimental processes and their documentation. Dr Danovi also explained that it is much easier to implement these workflows and platforms when starting up a new lab, it is a lot harder to change people’s existing workflows.

.@davide_danovi: Collaborating with people who have different methodological approaches to your field can be really valuable. #DSwebinar

— Digital Science (@digitalsci) November 5, 2015

Next to speak was Dr Joanne Kamens, Executive Director of Addgene. Dr Kamens was excited to be able to speak about collaboration, as she explained that it is Addgene’s favourite topic! Addgene is a not-for-profit organisation whose mission is to accelerate research and discovery by increasing collaboration and improving access to useful materials and information. They are always thinking of ways to help the community do a better job with collaboration, it’s the very reason Addgene was founded in the first place!

Addgene is a not-for-profit organisation whose mission is to accelerate research and discovery by increasing collaboration and improving access to useful materials and information.

Addgene collect plasmid reagents from people all over the world and then they take them, they impose quality control, they put them into their repository, and then they distribute them out to researchers all over the world, currently to 83 countries. Addgene are able to provide researchers with a large variety of low cost reagents and their business model is entirely self-sufficient. What makes Addgene unique is the breadth and size of their collection. The repository contains 40,000 plasmids from over 2,500 depositing labs. To date, Addgene has distributed over half a million plasmids world wide.

Through Addgene researchers can design experiments that use materials from multiple labs and this is expanding experimental design possibilities, which is accelerating research. Addgene adds value by playing a beneficial role in quality control, curation and recommendation. Addgene also provides technical support for researchers with plasmid selection and experimental design. Reproducibility is a huge factor in this type of work. The standardisation and sharing of reagents allows scientists to repeat studies, to validate them, and to extend them. This is a huge factor in improving the reproducibility of research.

You can get technical details about Addgene here https://t.co/Km81VdX5sx https://t.co/GRCLgHTwz1 #DSWebinar — Addgene (@Addgene) November 5, 2015

International access to materials is a big problem that Addgene works on solving. Labs want to share materials but there are all these logistical barriers which put a damper on collaboration. Another barrier which causes delay is the legal barrier and Addgene reduces this barrier for researchers via a simple electronic format for legal agreements.

In Dr Kamens opinion, scientists want to share, they want to collaborate and they want to do more with their materials. As Dr Kamens put it, “making collaboration easier means better science”!

Founder of Labguru, Jonathan Gross followed on from Dr Kamens. There’s lots of collaboration happening and it is just increasing and increasing. Researchers are now aware that collaborative research projects have a higher chance of receiving funding. In Gross’ opinion this raises the following question, what can we do to improve the day-to-day work of scientists in a collaborative environment?

This in turn raises lots of other questions. For example, how do researchers share knowledge? How do researchers share entities? How do you make the progress of research projects visible to all? How do you sustain the research continuity over a longer time frame, for example, when a member of a lab leaves? Dr Gross argued that we ought to be seriously worried about the long term preservation, availability and discoverability of protocols and research data, as well as other forms of informal lab knowledge.

“We ought to be seriously worried about the long term preservation, availability and discoverability of protocols and research data, as well as other forms of informal lab knowledge.”

His vision is for Labguru to be facilitating the infrastructure necessary for smarter research collaborations. Labguru provides a single platform where you can share your results with others and you can quickly and easily see overall project progress. A researcher can find a western blot in the platform and comment on it directly. If someone leaves the lab then all this information will still be available for future researchers.

We love this about @Labguru! Scientists also use Addgene distribution stats to demonstrate impact in grants https://t.co/vxHYdMK2hW

— Addgene (@Addgene) November 5, 2015

Finally, Dr Scott Tenenbaum, Associate Professor of Nanobioscience at the College of Nanoscale Science & Engineering, SUNY-Polytechnic Institute, shared his perspective on research collaborations involving academics and industry partners. In his current role Dr Tenenbaum manages several projects between small businesses, usually startups, universities and a third partner, usually a marketing partner.

Dr Tenenbaum explained that one of the challenges with these kinds of collaborations is that academics think about research in a fundamentally different way to people in industry, for example the milestone delivery-based approach adopted in these projects is often alien to academics.

The idea that the actual bench scientists can communicate with each other and collaborate with each other, in a single platform like Labguru, and that the PI can easily keep track of that is extremely appealing.

He explained how a tool like Labguru where industry partners and academics can work together, that allows collaborators to catalog, store and use information in real-time, but also can be used as a way of tracking progress would be incredibly beneficial. What he needs is some way in which multiple projects can be tracked and monitored in real-time, in a way that allows for separate budgeting and accounting, something that is more important in industry than in academia. The idea that the actual bench scientists can communicate with each other and collaborate with each other, in a single platform like Labguru, and that the P.I. can easily keep track of that is extremely appealing.

The post Embracing Team Science – #DSwebinar Summary appeared first on Digital Science.

Navigating the changing landscape of research publishing

Labguru are hosting a webinar on Thursday, July 30th, 12:00 EST, to discuss the ever changing landscape of research publications – from data citation prerequisites from funders, to open access requirements from journals.

By tuning in hopefully you will learn:

• What is open access
• What journals like Science require for acceptable publications
• What funders want to see from successful grant proposals in the future

…and how a real-time data capture platform like Labguru can make your life a lot easier!

To register for the webinar please click the button below and enter your details.

REGISTRATION NOW CLOSED

The post Preparing Research Publications for the Digital Age appeared first on Digital Science.

Currently a leading web-based electronic lab notebook (ELN) with integrated protocols and specimen management systems, Labguru announces a collection of new upgrades to their offering.

Scientific researchers in industry and academia can take advantage of these improvements immediately, which includes upgrades to their rodent specimen and vivarium management module for its e-Notebook and lab inventory management system.

With Labguru’s e-Notebook researchers interested in chemistry can:

• Import structures and reactions from all popular chemical structure drawing packages, including ChemDraw and Accelrys Draw.
• Draw structures and reactions directly in the browser, with no software installation (true “zero footprint”)
• Use auto-generated stoichiometry tables to calculate equivalents, mass, and percent yield, based on reactions in their notebook.
• Search their experiments and projects for chemical structures using structure, substructure and reaction transformation search.

Adding deep support for chemistry continues to be a priority for Labguru and these chemistry features demonstrate their commitment to making its leading ELN and laboratory information management system (LIMS) the leader in chemistry research.

Labguru also has a partnership with ChemAxon, which has allowed the Labguru team to rapidly integrate key features for chemists such as complete reaction support, including reaction planning and optimization, along with reaction transformation search. The new chemical search function will also help users properly annotate and find experiments in seconds. Biodata continues to look forward to further developments to enhance Labguru for chemists and biochemists.

Labguru has also released a major upgrade to its rodent colony collection making tracking rodents and treatment groups easier. This latest group of features completes the entire lifecycle of a rodent making it useful to researchers working on individual specimens to directors or heads of vivariums working with large rodent colonies.

With Labguru’s rodent and mouse management system you can track an entire rodent research journey:

• Strains, Specimens, and Cages – Manage your colony on all 3 levels
• Integrate With Your Research – Link rodents to related projects, storage locations, materials, experiments and results
• Reduce Costs – Minimize strain loss and excess breeding
• Advanced Search – Using multiple criteria like age, gender, strain, experiment, cage, and color
• Schedule and Plan – Plan experiments and receive reminders for maintenance task
• With the latest release users can plan and track treatments:
• Track the source and treatment history of each specimen
• Identify and replace aging and non-productive breeders
• Schedule maintenance and experiment tasks, receive reminders
• Web-based: Monitor your colony anytime, from anywhere

Labguru is currently used by thousands of researchers in hundreds of labs worldwide and if you want to find out more, do visit their website.

The post Labguru Enhances Their Chemistry Features appeared first on Digital Science.

The AcademiaPharma conference is Europe’s premier summit for the fast-tracking of academic collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry. The conference is taking place on the 12th and 13th May at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre in London. Louis Culot, CEO of Labguru, is one of the speakers at the conference.

The post Labguru to Host Drinks Reception in Celebration of Academia-Pharma Collaborations appeared first on Digital Science.

Labguru announce new coffee module for their lab management software!

The new module will help labs to monitor overall consumption and automatically re-order new stocks to ensure that you never run out of this essential lab resource. The analytics dashboard allows you to track the impact of caffeine on your lab’s productivity and optimise the time of caffeine consumption.

“I can now get automated alerts if a member of my lab is consuming coffee at a potentially dangerous level, thanks Labguru!”

The coffee module will integrate with Labguru’s electronic notebook, allowing researchers to transparently record and share their coffee brewing workflows. This will help with the much discussed reproducibility crisis; studies indicate that the majority of delicious coffees cannot be reliably reproduced. This is no longer a problem as Labguru’s new module allows you to accurately and easily record important workflow information, such as coffee type, brewing method, brew time, water temperature and so on.

A seamless integration with Labelguru means that you can easily print and label your coffee so you never have to worry about accidentally making a decaf brew or using the wrong type.

The new module also integrates with UpFolder which allows you to automatically upload data from a range of well known coffee making machines straight to your Labguru account.

The post Labguru Introduce A New Coffee Management Module appeared first on Digital Science.

Digital Science is pleased to share some big Labguru news!

Today, Labguru announces that the Innovative Medicines unit of AstraZeneca, the global pharmaceutical business, has adopted Labguru’s research and lab management system for the global management of biological reagents used in pre-clinical research.

Scientists will use the Labguru platform across multiple AstraZeneca sites in North America and Europe, replacing and consolidating several legacy systems spanning several scientific disciplines. Labguru’s modular web-based system offers an easy means of tracking projects, protocols, biological collections and materials, as well as streamlining collaboration between members of the lab and between institutions.

Louis Culot, Chief Executive Officer of BioData, the company behind Labguru, adds:

“AstraZeneca selected Labguru after a rigorous assessment of their needs and available solutions. Our approach comprising an integrated scientific research platform that currently enables multi-site academic collaboration, is resulting in measurable improvements in laboratory management, scientific reproducibility, and transparency. We look forward to supporting AstraZeneca’s vision of delivering life-changing medicines to patients.” 

Lorenz Mayr, VP of Reagents and Assay Development at AstraZeneca says:

“We conducted a comprehensive evaluation and found Labguru to be the most suitable solution for the management of our global preclinical biological reagents. BioData’s experience with supporting academic groups, together with the cloud-based Labguru installation, will allow AstraZeneca scientists greater opportunities to share our biological research reagents with future external partners, to support new drug discovery projects for which there is currently an unmet medical need.”

If you want to find out more about Labguru follow them on Twitter, they’re @Labguru.

The post AstraZeneca to Use Labguru for Research and Lab Management appeared first on Digital Science.