Driving standards for interoperable electronic lab notebooks.

The ELN Consortium is a collaborative community of electronic lab notebook (ELN) providers, researchers, and institutions working together to define and adopt open standards for data and metadata interchange. At its core, the Consortium enables research data to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) by promoting specification development, shared formats and best practices across the ELN ecosystem.

The Consortium’s primary goal is to develop common specifications — such as exchange file formats, shared metadata schemas and interoperability frameworks — that allow different ELN systems to exchange data seamlessly. While the initiative supports open-source solutions, it also welcomes proprietary platforms, fostering an inclusive environment for all ELN stakeholders.

Through this collaborative effort, the ELN Consortium empowers institutions and researchers to build reproducible, transparent and sustainable digital research infrastructures — ensuring that digital records of experiments, protocols and results can be shared across systems and reused across time.