This is heads up about a ‘coming attraction’.  For the past several months a group at Research Space has been working with the DataShare team, including Robin Rice and George Hamilton, to make it possible to deposit research data from our new RSpace electronic notebook into DataShare.

I gave the first public preview of this integration last month in a presentation called Electronic lab notebooks and data repositories:  Complementary responses to the scientific data problem  to a session on Research Data and Electronic Lab Notebooks at the American Chemical Society conference in Dallas.

When the RSpace ELN becomes available to researchers at Edinburgh later this spring, users of RSpace will be able to make deposits to DataShare directly from RSpace using a simple interface we have built into RSpace.  The whole process only takes a few clicks, and starts with selecting records to be deposited into DataShare and clicking on the DataShare button as illustrated in the following screenshot:You are then asked to enter some information about the deposit:

After confirming a few details about the deposit, the data is deposited directly into DataShare, and information about the deposit appears in DataShare.

We will provide details about how to sign up for an RSpace account in a future post later in the spring.  In the meantime, I’d like to thank Robin and George for working with us at RSpace on this exciting project.  As far as we know this is the first time an electronic lab notebook has ever been integrated with an institutional data repository, so this is a pioneering and very exciting experiment!  We hope to use it as a model for similar integrations with other institutional and domain-specific repositories.

Rory MacNeil
Chief Executive, Research Space