Market research reports - worth the money?

I came across this ELN report that lists "major players in the ELN sector". Hmmmm.... I'm the CEO of one of the companies that report mentions, and I have never heard of them. I see a lot of spam email and online posts like this that loudly pronounce they are from the "#1 Sophisticated Market Research Reports Platform", but apparently "sophisticated" does not involve picking up a phone, calling the number on our website and talking to us about our product, much less actually using it, or asking the vendor anything at all about it. I can't imagine what this "report" could possible have to say about CERF ELN or RSpace ELN, but since they have never asked for product or company information of any kind, I can't imagine it would be anything useful. Furthermore, I think it is probably safe to assume they didn't speak to most of the other vendors they listed in their report either, so my advice would be: Save your money and don't bother with this "report".

I have seen a proliferation of advertisements like this in our sector, and I am surprised that this could possibly be a viable business model, since most of the time the report actually consists of a list of vendors who PAID to have a short description of their product included, and then the "report" is sold for an outrageous fee to gullible execs who don't want to pick up the phone and talk to the ELN vendor directly, which they could easily do for free.

In my opinion, the only way to really find out if an enterprise software product does what you need for your organization is to actually try it in situ, and see for yourself if it solves your problem. Relying on the poorly informed advice of others seems like a lazy strategy, and relying on the paid of advice of anyone who has never even seen the product seems even worse.

Update... I see that another (or, possibly, the same) report is now also being advertised on linkedin here:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6897461786472280064/

It's unfortunate that this article uses an uncredited image stolen from our website at:

http://cerf-notebook.com/articles/what-is-an-eln/.

The image clearly shows a mockup of one of our products, CERF ELN on the faux computer screen.  The lazy use of this ripped-off image doesn't exactly reassure me that the content of the report is going to be professional, reliable and original. There is an argument that says any publicity is good publicity for our product, and maybe I should be flattered that they used this image, but they could have at least asked first. I feel like I owe it to my colleagues in science and data management to make sure they receive accurate information in any industry reports that they purchase. In this case, it seems unlikely that this report would contain anything that I couldn't also get for free from the vendor's website. In the words of a certain well known TV game show host turned part-time politician,  this ELN report kinda seems like it might be "fake news".

On the shoulders of giants...

Isaac Newton once famously said:

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

The idea that the insights of today owe much to the hard work of others who went before us is not new.  As far back as the 12th century John of Salisbury wrote in his work Metalogicon: 

"Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature."

The tradition of the lab notebook clearly acknowledged the importance of this concept. Knowledge accumulates and builds. Discoveries beget discoveries, and thought stimulates further thought. This is why it is so important that scientists properly and accurately document their work.

I was struck by the poignance of a recent article: "Newly discovered notes show Venetian physician had a key role in shaping early modern chemistry."  The article talks about a lesser-none Venetian physician called  Santorio Santori.

The newly rediscovered notes help us to understand how the foundations for modern evidence-based medicine were laid in the 16th century and the study of these notes is like a slightly one-sided conversation with the author. Lev Vygotsky has said that all learning is social. This is another key reason why the preservation of the creative thought processes of scientists as written words is so important. To study these thought processes is to enter into a social dialog of sorts with the author, even if the author lived hundreds of years ago, and according to Vygotsky, social interactions invariably lead to, and and are in fact required for the construction of new knowledge.

Mass Innovation Labs Announces Adoption of RSpace as Digital Data Management Service for Member Companies

"Mass Innovation Labs, a cutting-edge incubator for scientific start-ups, together with the UK firm ResearchSpace, and its Ohio affiliate, Lab-Ally, have announced that the RSpace electronic lab notebook (ELN) will be made available to member companies to help catalyze their research and protect their intellectual property. Mass Innovation Labs has become the accelerator of choice for Boston's small startups and rapidly maturing life-science companies like Editas Medicine, Cellaria and C4 Therapeutics. 

The addition of RSpace to Mass Innovation’s suite of infrastructure tools will facilitate accurate lab data collection and help with trouble-free commercialization of members’ discoveries. RSpace will also smooth the process of graduation from incubator to larger facility by ensuring that critical knowledge assets, IP provenance and due diligence procedures are not lost or disrupted by the logistics of growth, or the rigors of relocation. RSpace features an open framework and modern API that allow seamless integration with data sources like Dropbox, Box, Google Docs, MS OneDrive, and Github, as well as connection to verbose data held in file servers, sample management systems and more. RSpace will help Mass Innovation Labs members share and archive files securely, but also allows for easy bundling and export of data in ways that maintain integrity and traceability. Embedded metadata and digital signatures protect members' data claims even when information is disclosed externally to auditors, investors or other stakeholders."

See full release here:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/04/prweb14245218.htm

This is quite a coup for RSpace ELN. The fact that our system was chosen over many products produced by much larger companies shows that MIL really understands the value of our "connected ELN" model.

CERF ELN Version 5.0 is here!

Well folks, CERF ELN 5.0 is finally ready for release. 

Read the press release here.

CERF 5.0 is the result of an enormous amount of hard work by many people and is the culmination of almost 2 years of work. This is the first version of CERF created by its new producer, Lab-Ally.

Job one was locating and moving the source code to an all-new, modern, agile and fully integrated development, build and support platform. This new platform will allow us to move forward more quickly after this initial release (or more accurately "re-boot"). Our next engineering task involved updating the core components that make the whole shebang work. JAVA, Tomcat , Open Office, MySQL and modern SSL certificates, plus dozens of other components and libraries that all needed to be updated.

Next came the hard part, refactoring all the code to get the updated components and build environment to work together and spit out a functioning product. This part took us months, but when the newest version was finally birthed, we liked what we saw.

Then we went on a graphics spree, refreshing and redesigning almost all of the icons and buttons, and adding support for GUI features (like Mac's full screen mode) that didn't exist when CERF was first created.

As we worked on the product and started using it for data management within our own organization, obvious priorities for new features, improvements and refinements started to emerge, as did the need to "comment out" certain older, buggy or deprecated features that we plan to circle back to later. The rate at which the team started to brainstorm new ideas began to accelerate. New feature requests poured into our request system (JIRA) and before long, an ambitious roadmap that stretches years into the future started to emerge.

CERF 5 focusses on shoring up the product's most powerful features: semantic metadata and semantic search, round trip editing, flexible import and export of data and the use of notes, tags and configurable ontologies to add meaning to your files. Several new search parameters were added and the default search parameter list was re-designed to make it easier to use. A new export tool was created and a new version of the Automaton (formerly the "Automation Client" was built. Lab-Ally has also redoubled efforts to prioritize product quality, speed and and stability and is also putting much more emphasis on clear and complete documentation as well as compliance with industry-standard security tools like MS and Apple code signing, (which previously had been largely ignored). looking into the future, CERF will become increasingly focussed on the needs of GLP or "spirit of GLP" labs, with full support for things like ALCOA and related documentation principles.

The last piece in the puzzle was tracking down the code for the iPad App and redesigning it to work with modern iPads and to comply with Apple's more stringent code and security standards.  Honestly The iPad app was never much more than a prototype when it was first released in 2010 or 2011, so it took quite a lot of effort to finally get the new version to the point where we were comfortable releasing it. We called it iCERF and it's available on the itunes store now.

We are happy with the results and we think CERF is well positioned to take advantage of a growing demand for a full-featured Electronic Lab Notebook and 21CFR11 compliant document management system that can be installed on-site. The cloud may be popular for many sorts of data storage, but when it comes to mission critical, irreplaceable intellectual property, the smart organizations are getting tired of huge corporations holding their data hostage on the cloud where we all know that the US and Chinese governments will probably rummage through it any time they like.

If you want a free demo of this newest version, please contact lab-ally.