Electronic Lab Notebook
The ELN file format has been defined as an archive format to capture Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN).
An ELN archive is a ZIP file with the .eln extension (media type application/vnd.eln+zip), containing a single root folder, which is an RO-Crate.
The ELN specification is based on the RO-Crate specification and is exported by Lab notebook software, including eLabFTW.
ELN archives can be created on the desktop with ELNPack, previewed in Dataverse, and validated. The ELN Metadata Diff Viewer compares differences in ELN’s RO-Crate metadata. A series of ELN templates are available.
ELN implementations and examples
| Implementation | .eln import | .eln export | Example and specialisation |
|---|---|---|---|
| datalab | ✅ | datalab | |
| eLabFTW | ✅ | ✅ | elabftw |
| ELN Metadata Diff Viewer | ✅ | ||
| ELNPack | ✅ | ||
| Kadi4Mat | ✅ | ✅ | kadi4mat |
| LinkAhead | ✅ | ||
| NOMAD | ✅ | ||
| OpenSemanticLab | ✅ | ✅ | OpenSemanticLab |
| Pasta | ✅ | ✅ | PASTA |
| Reformulation Assurance | ✅ | reformulation-assurance | |
| Rspace | ✅ | ✅ | RSpace |
| SampleDB | ✅ | ✅ | SampleDB |
| SciLog | ✅ | ✅ | SciLog |
Table adapted from TheELNConsortium/TheELNFileFormat
Related publications
Max Schröder, Susanne Staehlke, Paul Groth, J. Barbara Nebe, Sascha Spors, Frank Krüger (2022):
Structure-based knowledge acquisition from electronic lab notebooks for research data provenance documentation.
Journal of Biomedical Semantics 13(4)
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13326-021-00257-x
Hanna Tsybenko, Sarath Menon, Fei Chen, Abril Azocar Guzman, Katharina Grünwald, Steffen Brinckmann, Tilmann Hickel, Tim Dahmen, Volker Hofmann, Stefan Sandfeld, Ruth Schwaiger (2025):
Digital Transformation in Materials Science: A User Journey of Nanoindentation, Image Analysis and Simulations.
Data Science Journal 24:23
https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2025-033
Steffen Brinckmann, Georg Winkens, Ruth Schwaiger (2026):
PASTA-ELN: Simplifying Research Data Management for Experimental Materials Science.
Advanced Engineering Materials e202503181
https://doi.org/10.1002/adem.202503181
Rory Macneil, Daniel Turner (2025):
Implementing RO-Crate in Research Space.
Zenodo
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16986906