After three years in development, the team at Research Space is delighted to introduce RSpace. Developed in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, the University of Goettingen and the University of Wisconsin, RSpace is the first electronic lab notebook designed for use by researchers throughout research intensive academic institutions.

RSpace comes in two versions. RSpace Enterprise is a best of breed ELN designed to meet the needs of modern labs — easy to use and fully featured to attract researchers, and with support for in-lab and interlab collaboration that meets the requirements of PIs.  It’s also a true enterprise product – with support for LDAP and Shibolleth to meet the needs of IT departments – and scalable.  And RSpace is the only ELN that integrates with modern research data management infrastructure: it supports connnection to institutional file stores, repositories and archives, as illustrated in the following diagram showing how RSpace plays an integral role in the University of Edinburgh’s RDM infrastructure.

RSpace Community is a carbon copy of RSpace Enterprise.  It has exactly the same features for researchers and groups as RSpace Enterprise, just without the connection to institutional file stores, repositories and archives.  It’s perfect for labs, and for collaborations with labs at other universities.  And guess what, it’s free.  Really free.  Unlike other ELNs, RSpace Community does not charge for setting up groups, and data storage is also free.

Last but not least, we’ve made it possible for individual researchers, and labs, to move data seamlessly between the two versions of RSpace.  So, if you’re a PI, you can get started with RSpace Community, and when your institution adopts RSpace Enterprise you can move your lab’s data into the institution’s RSpace Enterprise instance, retaining all the permissions and structure.  And the reverse move from RSpace Enterprise to RSpace Community is equally possible.

Phil  Libin at Evernote is famous for saying he built his startup to last for 100 years.  That’s our vision for RSpace too.  With the two versions of RSpace we’ve put in place an infrastructure that will support researchers throughout their career as they progress from PhD to postdoc to PI and move between institutions, and the long term needs of institutions as they build out an RDM infrastructure that meets the requirements of funders to make research data public and preserve it.

Join us for the journey — every feature, capability and improvement in RSpace has been added in response to a specific request from a researcher, a PI, an IT manager or a research data management professional at Edinburgh, Goettingen, Wisconsin and a host of other universities. We look forward to developing RSpace in ways that meet your needs too.