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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

>design some file-organizing system that involves giving research images a sensible name. And then when it comes to checking your paper before you publish it, you need to trace back all the images to the raw data and check them against the metadata. For example, if you have a photo labelled as ‘Day three’, does that correspond to the date the photo was taken or that the experiment happened on?

Blockchain, but with human-readable metadata? Sure sounds like it is do-able.

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No need for any blockchains here, this essentially describes an SDMS (scientific data management system). Which do exist, but are not very common outside of larger companies. And the more common Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN) are in most cases only connected to the original data in a rather haphazard way, if at all.

You need to make the entire process digital, from measuring the data to tranferring and storing it and then linking it in your ELN or any other place you make use of it. That's a process that is only just beginning in many cases, if at all.

Or maybe just adopt the modern solution and use a electronic lab notebook (ELN). I'm a software engineer and we are trying to introduce ELN in our institution, it's not easy to convince researchers of the benefits of reproducibility. People really just use manual methods like "sensible names"

What is an ELN?

Electronic lab notebook.

An issue, and maybe you can speak to this from experience, is the dread of Enterprise Software.

The notebook has to support recording any kind of information, be accessible anywhere, even on tiny laptop screens, and otherwise stay out of the way. It should involve little or no manual data transfer. It should probably work harmoniously with git. For some of us, investing brain cells in the use of proprietary software might be a negative.

For my work, Jupyter notebooks are the best solution I've found. A wet chemist might have a different opinion.

There are plenty of non commercial, non enterprise ELN system. With all their down sides, they are all pretty similar and relatively easy to use (they could use better UI but that's often a problem in research). I think it's almost completely a cultural problem

Image certification is already a thing https://rohitbhargava.com/leica-pioneers-the-anti-ai-camera-...

No, a notepad.

Data is taken from other papers, it cannot be centralized.

Since we're talking about immutable data...sure it can. If you really need to prove provenance of the metadata, surely a checksum is enough?

You just photograph the notepad and release it as an artifact alongside the paper, if you don't feel like typing it up.

Or you skip the notepad and use a tablet and an electronic lab notebook. I know of a few researcher doing this successfully, but for this to work at scale senior scientists and group leaders need to force everyone in their labs to do the same

Absolutely a culture issue rather than a technical one!

Yes the technology was there already 15 years ago (minus a nicer UI and a slightly better UX). Researchers despite all the talk about innovation are surprisingly resistant to change

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