Time savings:
- Less lost work.
In addition to wasting money, re-doing work due to information loss also wastes time. As explained above,
most of this time would be saved if the information is managed using the iPad system.
- Faster search.
Researchers spend a substantial amount of time looking for information in their notes and their computer, as well
searching for supplies. iPad could greatly decrease this time since information stored in iPad's database would
be well-organized and could be found very quickly with iPad's structure-based search and browsing tools.
- Faster communication and formatting.
iPad can also save a substantial amount of time on improving efficiency of communication. Information needs to be
constantly communicated between researchers, their colleagues and collaborators, group leaders, Institute
administration, and the scientific community. iPad will offer a common repository of well-organized information
where everyone can quickly find the parts of specific interest. This reduces repetition and loss of information that
often happens when communicating in person or through email. Also, information from the database can be automatically
formatted and re-formatted for various uses such as reports, publication drafts, grant applications, web sites, etc.
This would save a significant amount of time currently spent on manual formatting of written information.
A study found that usage of electronic notebooks in research significantly increased the overall efficiency of the work process as compared to using paper-based notebooks (2). This suggests that iPad, due to its unique functionalities, should result in an even greater increase in efficiency relative to the current paper-based system.
Increase in the quality and quantity of research:
- Useful perspectives.
Information stored in iPad could be automatically re-arranged and visualized in a variety of convenient representations.
This functionality would allow researchers and project leaders to view information from different useful perspectives.
This in turn could lead to new insights into scientific and organizational problems.
- Improved collaboration.
iPad will allow researchers to co-author documents (i.e., to create documents together), to share data and other
information, to detect automatically any related research activity, and to easily find information in their colleagues'
notes and reports (with proper permissions, of course).
- Improved project management.
iPad's database would provide project leaders with comprehensive and up-to-date information about their projects,
as well as about other relevant projects (with proper permissions). iPad could also automatically notify them by email
of any changes and updates to the information of interest. As a result, iPad would enable project leaders to better
plan, assist, and evaluate the work.
- More information given to the scientific community.
The ultimate goal of research at Institut Pasteur is to contribute new and important information to the world's
collective knowledge. However, a very large percentage of useful information does not get published, and therefore,
does not become available to the scientific community (e.g., negative or insufficiently "interesting" results,
abandoned projects, details of methods, etc.). By entering reports or research notes in iPad, scientists would create
a comprehensive database of research information which would contain both published and unpublished information.
This would serve as a unique resource for the Institute, and in the future, could also be made available for the
worldwide scientific community. Institut Pasteur could be the pioneer of this very important initiative (3).
Furthermore, preserving research information for the community should have a positive effect on the motivation
of researchers – it is generally demotivating to know that a large portion of one's work (the unpublished information)
will become irrelevant.
- Structured scientific information.
In the near future, iPad could also play a critical role in launching another important initiative: structuring
scientific data within documents. Such an initiative would enable scientists to easily find and analyze data that
are currently buried within scientific texts (4).
References:
1. The Gilbane Report: Content, Computing, Commerce - Technology & Trends. May, 2002. (http://www.gilbane.com).
2. The R&D team computing study report: Comparing paper and electronic lab notebooks. TeamScience, Inc., 1998. (http://www.censa.org).
3. Jonathan Knight. Negative Results: Null and void. Nature, Vol. 422, 554-555, 2003.
4. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler. Scientific publishing on the 'semantic web'. Nature Debates, April 2001.
(http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/bernerslee.htm).