Lab notebook tool Hivebench will be integrated with Mendeley to help researchers enrich and manage their data

Research data is the foundation on which scientific, technical, social and medical knowledge is built. That’s why enabling access to, sharing and reuse of data is tremendously valuable to everyone involved in advancing science.

Of course, making research data manageable for researchers and their colleagues is not always easy. Proper data management requires solutions that help researchers not just store, but also share, discover and re-use their data. That way, authors receive credit for their work while the wider research community benefits from discovering and using research data.

Using research data to its full potential requires consistency in the way it is collected and stored. Hivebench provides an essential first step in this process. It is a digital laboratory notebook that helps researchers prepare, conduct and analyze experiments, methods, and protocols in one place, saving them valuable time. Hivebench has thousands of registered users who position it in the center of their research process. Importantly, Hivebench allows researchers to link data and metadata without requiring them to change the way they work. This avoids making data collection feel like an administrative overhead.

On Wednesday 1 June, Elsevier acquired Hivebench to help further streamline the workflow of researchers – putting research data management at their fingertips. The added value of the integration lies in linking Hivebench with Elsevier’s existing Research Data Management portfolio for products and services. The research data that researchers have stored in the Hivebench notebook are linked to the Mendeley Data repository, which will be linked to Pure. This way, the research data is linked with metadata such as the DOI, the published article, controlled data versioning, and the methodology, which adds instant value to the datasets because they become far more suitable for reuse.

Researchers will benefit in a number of ways. Many funders these days require insight into the research design, process, and data sets. This becomes easier with the help of an electronic lab notebook. Research also shows that articles that are linked with their underlying data get cited more. In addition, well-described data sets can sometimes be more useful than an article itself. Sometimes when doing research, the number of articles to read and digest can be overwhelming – it can be hard to determine what to read and what not to read. Data can provide more information, provided of course that the right metadata are linked to it so the data sets are adequately described. And that’s exactly what we’re doing by linking Hivebench to Mendeley Data.

“Saving researchers time by providing them with a user-friendly way to store and manage their data has been our focus until now,” said Dr. Julien Thérier, CEO and founder of Shazino, the Lyon, France-based company that launched Hivebench. “But we knew that if we wanted to scale up our activities and create additional added value, our product would need to be integrated with a chain of tools that catered to the need of researchers to share and reuse data sets as well. We’ve been collaborating with Elsevier’s Mendeley for the past two years and already enable Hivebench users to export their results to Mendeley Data.”

The integration with Elsevier will enable Hivebench to make its services available to many more researchers, making sharing and reuse possible on an unprecedented scale – and unlocking the full potential of research data.