American Chemical Society, Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 3(55), p. 501-509, 2015
DOI: 10.1021/ci5005948
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In designing an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) there is a balance to be struck between keeping it as general and multidisciplinary as possible for simplicity of use and maintenance and introducing more domain-specific functionality to increase their appeal to target research areas. Here we describe the results of a collaboration between the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the University of Southampton, guided by the aims of the Dial-a-Molecule Grand Challenge, intended to achieve the best of both worlds and augment a discipline-agnostic ELN, LabTrove, with chemistry-specific functionality and using data provided by the ChemSpider platform. This has been done using plug-in technology to ensure maximum transferability with minimal effort of the chemistry functionality to other ELNs, and equally other subject-specific functionality to LabTrove. The resulting product, ChemTrove, has undergone a usability trial by selected academics and the resulting feedback will guide the future development of the underlying ELN technology.