LABORATORY INFORMATICS GUIDE 2013 | DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT ➤
simpler sharing and collaboration. Where a number of people are working together on a project it makes sense for them to have access to the same background resources and to be able to share notes on those resources. One company that aims to help this process
5792 DocMan advert 130x213mm_5792 DocMan advert 130x213mm 06/12/2012 10:13 Page 1
is Mendeley, a London start-up that already has more than two million users worldwide for its research-sharing platform. Victor Henning, the company’s co-founder and CEO, comments: ‘The main advantage we hear is that we provide a common repository. We enable collaboration, where people can see the comments of others
and synch content across devices. People value being able to have a back-up in the cloud, and being able to share with workers out in the field and work offline.’ The platform was designed particularly with
academic users in mind. However, around 10 to 15 per cent of Mendeley’s users are researchers in industry and elsewhere. Users include pharmaceutical and biotech companies, government bodies, political think-tanks, agricultural organisations and even a special effects company in the film industry, says Henning.
The platform can be used to share any type
of file, but Mendeley’s interface is primarily geared to managing PDFs. Beyond sharing and collaborating, bringing documents together on one platform has other potential benefits too. Henning says the company has had requests from pharmaceutical companies to mine across all their resources. This is something that currently has copyright implications, but the company is looking into the possibilities. Mendeley also releases its API so users can build their own tools and integrate with internal tools, such as Sharepoint.
ORGANISING THE ADMIN Similar principles guide the organisation, sharing and managing the approval process of the other documents that are essential accompaniments to any laboratory project. Such documents include standard operating procedures (SOPs), process operating instructions (POIs), study plans and regulatory guidelines. An example of a tool to help meet these needs
A document management system for the circulation, reading and recording of key documents in the lab or the whole of your business.
Easy to use, flexible, secure, scalable
Check ‘read’ or ‘review’ status of documents at the click of a button
Robust document audit trail
Email alert notification when a new document is ready for review
Simple but powerful search capabilities Range of licensing options, including cloud-based hosting
DocMan is part of the LabsForm suite of laboratory software created by Terrington Data Management.
For more information visit
www.LabsForm.com
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www.scientific-computing.com/lig2013 Changing the face of data collection
is DocMan from Terrington Data Management. This tool, according to the company, ‘allows the user to see all the documents they are required to read and sign off, once read and understood. The user can also create new documents and submit these to a review process. Reporting tools detail who has to read issued documents or who still has to read them. Workflow emailing can be configured so that automatic emails are sent to a user when a document requires review/approval.’ Kate Darley, the business development for
the comnpany’s lab software, notes: ‘What customers need to do with these documents depends on the document. For example, a newly created SOP will need to go through a review/approval process before being released, with several reviewers at each stage. When the SOP is issued it needs to be “required reading” for users of the procedure. For less formal documents, i.e. a monthly project report (for R&D), it may only require a review by a project leader and someone in management before release. Whatever the review/approval procedure, the customer needs to be able to track the status of a document and have a means by which to track unread documents and who has not read them.’ Prior to the adoption of such tools, many
companies used paper-based systems (see case study: Unilabs York Bioanalytical Solutions). As Darley explains, ‘With paper-based systems, apart from having to print multiple copies of documents, the main problems are keeping
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