Record keeping guidelines

This document serves as a comprehensive guide for maintaining and organizing records within the lab. It covers the management of source code, lab notebooks, shared files, and other key resources to ensure efficient and consistent documentation of lab activities. Effective record keeping is not only essential for scientific research by facilitating reproducibility, collaboration, and project management, but also to comply with requirements from funders and CeMM.

Source Code

The creation, updating, and maintenance of source code are conducted on GitHub: Rendeiro Lab GitHub. Each project is assigned its own GitHub repository, with its name registered in the Lab Project Registry.

Structuring Projects

• Follow the guidelines outlined in the Lab Project Template to structure and maintain repositories effectively.
• Ensure that source code is kept up-to-date in the respective repository for each project.

Lab Notebooks

It is essential to maintain detailed, up-to-date records of daily activities. This includes:

• Notes and sketches on ongoing projects.
• Progress on analyses.
• Logs of seminars attended, papers read, or other relevant activities.

Digital and Physical Notes

• Use markdown-based notes in Obsidian for digital documentation.
• Optionally, concatenate markdown notes and print them on sticky paper for inclusion in physical lab notebooks.

Shared OneDrive Folder

The official platform for file sharing is the CeMM-provided OneDrive, accessible here: Shared Documents.

Best Practices

• Update the folder regularly, especially when reaching milestones such as paper submissions, talk presentations, or poster creations.
• Organize files in a compartmentalized manner by subject (e.g., figures, presentations, documents, notes).
• Prefix all file names with the format YYYY-MM-DD- to ensure chronological order.
• Create subfolders per lab member if necessary.

Presentations

• Save all internal and external presentations in both .pptx and .pdf formats.
• Deposit them in the Presentations Folder.

Figures

• Include all figures used in fellowship proposals, preliminary data, seminar concepts, and work-in-progress for papers.
• Save figures in .ai/.svg and .pdf formats.
• Deposit them in the Figures Folder.

Fellowship Proposals

• Include only final versions of fellowship proposals.
• Save proposals in .docx, .odt, or .tex formats alongside .pdf versions.
• If multiple files are submitted, use a .zip file for consolidation.
• Deposit proposals in the Grants and Fellowships Folder.

CeMM-specific requirements for projects

CeMM has specific guidelines for data management, in particular for projects that exist on the HPC cluster. Read more about it on the intranet.

In particular, each project should have a cemm_metadata.json file.

The research page also provides information on this.

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