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This post was contributed by Rory Macneil, founder of Research Space.

There are many types of electronic lab notebooks (ELNs), each with its own pros and cons. All ELNs have the virtue of liberating data from paper into an electronic environment and hence making it searchable and shareable, but some ELNs provide better support for reproducibility than others.

Unfortunately, most ELNs are designed as closed ecosystems and act as data silos because they limit connectivity with other tools and resources. Thus, it’s difficult to get data out of the ELN. This means that reproducibility is limited in two ways – only data inside the ELN is reproducible, and only the highly restricted number of people who can access the ELN have the ability to attempt to reproduce the research that produced the data.

The holidays may be over, but signs of holiday spirit still linger on around the Addgene office as we peruse the #DeckTheLab submissions. We asked all of the Addgenies to pick their favorites out of the bunch and here’s what ended up on top.

Addgene has so much to celebrate! As we enter this new growth phase of the organization and the expansion of our impact, I’d like to take a moment and honor all of the success we have achieved and the opportunities we have for the future. At Addgene we will never ever stop planning, perfecting, and learning, but there are a lot of things we actually don’t have to worry about and that is something to recognize!

When Jessica Sacher, a microbiologist from the University of Alberta, saw that scientists were using Twitter to find phages to treat an antibiotic resistant bacterial infection, she shared that tweet with Jan Zheng, a UX designer that she knew. “We had actually met at a lindy hop swing dance event,” Zheng says (networking can happen anywhere!). The pair quickly teamed up to create Phage Directory in a whirlwind three days in November 2017.

15 years of plasmid sharing has certainly taken us on many adventures...From moving office locations three times, to opening our UK office in 2014, to starting our viral vector service in 2016...we’re excited to help scientists share their reagents with the scientific community.