Subject: The Electronic Lab Notebooks Consortium (The R&D Team Computing Consortium)

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 16:22:45 -0500

This press release is simultaneously submitted to CHMINF-L, CHEMIND-L, CCL, 
ISISforum-l, and Mol-Diversity lists.  If you have subscriptions to more 
than one of these lists, we apologize for the multiple posting.
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Subj:	Re: The Electronic Lab Notebooks Consortium
From:	[email-masked] (Rich Lysakowski)

Lorrin,

There are no full solutions on the market for collaborative electronic
laboratory notebooks now.  Vendors who had the best "software notebook"
products have withdrawn them from the market, at least temporarily.  

This is a complex area with difficult requirements to meet because of the 
extensive legal and regulatory contraints, and the appropriate technology 
components.  However, all required pieces exist today, including the 
technology and full understanding of the legal and regulatory requirements.  
They just must be fitted together in the appropriate combinations and 
processes to support recordkeeping for patent and regulatory litigation 
in regulated R&D processes.

We spent several years researching requirements and working with vendors 
as a vendor-independent scientific software product research information and 
consulting service.  We have very extensively researched all commercial
products 
that come even close to meeting the needs of scientists for electronic
notebooks.   
We are willing to share the results with your requestors.

We created the vendor-independent consortium to drive the open forum 
and open process required to create electronic notebooks and the larger 
systems into which they must fit. 

This is called "The R&D Team Computing Consortium" (a.k.a. The Electronic
Laboratory Notebooks Consortium") and is described below.  This new
consortium of 15+ chemical, pharmaceutical and biotech companies will 
deliver mission-critical software systems for electronic laboratory notebooks

and team data management and collaboration within a short time frame, greatly

accelerated by the results of our research.  We expect the software notebook 
systems to have integrated tools for combinatorial chemistry, chemical 
structure databases, and biological information databases, as well as 
instrument interfacing and LIMS.  We will be working with various vendors
that make these tools already to integrate them into the solutions.

Hence, this recent press release is right in line with your query.  

Could you please disseminate it to your requestors, and have them 
contact me directly?   I will be able to give them accurate and 
up-to-date information about what is happening in this emerging 
software market.

Rich Lysakowski, Ph.D.
Director of R&D
The R&D Team Computing Consortium

==============================================
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Contact:  Dr. Rich Lysakowski
The R&D Team Computing Consortium
(a.k.a. The Electronic Notebooks Consortium)
phone: 508-443-4771
e-mail:  [email-masked]

TeamScience, Inc.,  8 Pheasant Avenue Sudbury, Massachusetts USA 01776
=========================================================

Industry Consortium Recruits Members To Create Advanced Software Systems for
Scientific Laboratories

Vendor-Independent Initiative Uses Open Process to Replace Outmoded
R&D Project Data Management Systems

Collaborative Electronic Laboratory Notebooks Being Driven to Market
By User-Funded Consortium

=========================================================

BOSTON, MA--The R&D Team Computing Consortium (a.k.a. The Electronic
Laboratory Notebook Software Consortium) is recruiting additional member
companies to help define and drive the creation of broad-based industry
solutions for software electronic laboratory notebooks and R&D project data
management and collaboration systems.  Founded in late 1995 by companies in
the chemical, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, this 15-plus
member consortium is using an open, vendor-independent process to specify
design requirements and fund qualified vendors to develop advanced software
systems to meet the needs of chemists, biologists, and materials scientists
and engineers.

"The entire current system of R&D project data management is archaic in the
electronic age, because critical R&D information is too often locked away on
paper" says Dr. Rich Lysakowski, a principal of TeamScience Inc, the software
research and engineering project management firm that is leading and managing
the consortium.  "Data need to be easily searched and shared by other
researchers or authorized people with a need to know."

This two-year industry-wide collaborative project will deliver specifications
and object-oriented software for collaborative electronic notebooks and other
specialized modules for client/server computers to meet the diverse needs of
these different communities.  The consortium is funding vendors to rapidly
develop modular and highly reusable mission-critical solutions that support
recordkeeping in legally-defensible ways for regulated industries.

"To meet our aggressive schedule we are building on top of well-tested
industry-leading platforms already in wide use, rather than building from
scratch.  We are emphasizing forward-looking tools and standards such as
CORBA, Java, the World Wide Web, and others that apply to laboratory and R&D
applications," says Dr. Lysakowski.

"We have researched the requirements and priorities for many companies over
the past years, including several in the Electronic Records Consortium (ERC),
to ensure that we have completely covered the needs of these industries," Dr.
Lysakowski adds.

The R&D Team Computing Consortium is building on the work of the ERC and
other more recent research projects.  The technologies of electronic
recordkeeping systems, groupware, document and workflow management, LIMS and
instrument interfacing tools, chemical and biological information databases,
the World Wide Web, intelligent agents, and integration tools are ready to be
applied to this unique set of automation problems faced by R&D teams.  By
pooling the resources of major end-user corporations, and utilizing the core
competencies and best-of-breed technologies from qualified vendors, the
consortium will deliver open, integrated software platforms and intelligent
tools to significantly enhance scientific R&D and testing laboratory project
data management productivity and global collaboration>while addressing the
legal and regulatory needs to create and preserve reliable and trustworthy
electronic records.

Scientists have long felt the need for electronic laboratory notebooks as a
way to minimize the tedium of laboratory work.  Currently, researchers often
spend many hours per week capturing data in paper notebooks to document their
work.  Paper notebooks are just one part of a much larger system for managing
records, data and documents in research and development projects.  Scientists
require flexible, open and interoperable software solutions for electronic
laboratory notebooks, project data management, and collaboration.  These
tools must come from several software markets simultaneously.  A major
technical goal of the consortium is to pull together all necessary pieces,
which exist already, and use them in the right combinations to satisfy all
major requirements, and at the same time establish some software standards
for open, integrated systems for R&D and testing laboratories.

Progress on these inevitable electronic laboratory software notebook systems
had been impeded by the immaturity of software technology and standards, and
by rampant ignorance of existing technology and procedures to address the
legal and regulatory concerns.  However, software, legal, and regulatory
experts in the top Fortune 500 companies now agree that practical and prudent
electronic ways are available to address each of these concerns.  Software
and standards have matured to the point where global electronic laboratory
notebooks and project data management systems are really just a logical next
step beyond the current the World Wide Web and various commercial groupware
and document management systems on the market today.

The vendor selection process will begin within the next few months.
Qualified vendors of electronic laboratory notebooks, groupware, document
and workflow management, LIMS and instrument interfacing systems, scientific
information databases, and integration tools will be awarded contracts to
develop and support various scientific software clients, middleware, and base
platform enhancements.  The user-driven consortium will provide the necessary
open process to ensure that the emerging products fit end users' needs well.

End user companies and software vendors interested in participating should 
contact:

Director of R&D
The R&D Team Computing Consortium
TeamScience, Inc.
8 Pheasant Avenue
Sudbury, MA 01776.    
E-mail: [email-masked]
Tel: 508-443-4771
Fax: 508-879-8120