Dr. Lisa Schmitt is a research assistant at the Chair of Microsystems Technology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. In CRC MARIE, she researches microactuators for MEMS-based reflectarrays and MEMS waveguides, functioned as a speaker for the PhD cohort, and works as a PI for project S01 in the third funding phase of MARIE. She received the Data Champion Award for her pioneering use of the electronic lab notebook eLabFTW to document her scientific process. In our interview, she spoke to us about the importance of documentation, her use of eLabFTW for that purpose, and the necessity of investing time into RDM.

RDS: Congratulations on your well-deserved Data Champion Award. In your usual research, which services and tools from the INF project do you use?

LS: I have mostly been working with eLabFTW. I think it’s a really great software. In microsystems technology we work in different labs within the clean room so it is difficult to access experimental plans or flowcharts – but with eLabFTW, everything is online. You can use eLabFTW wherever you are, in your office or the lab, and you can share everything with your colleagues. I really liked working with this tool; it made sharing my flowcharts with other colleagues very easy.

RDS: That’s great. As you know that it can be difficult to convince researchers to use these tools because doing so can be time consuming. What convinced you?

LS: First of all, I want to say that it really is time consuming. We invest much time in designing, fabricating, and characterizing our MEMS chips, we publish our findings – and then we still have to think about archiving and data storage. But I do think good RDM is important, because if people ask you how you did your work, you should be able to explain your process, even some years later.

What convinced me the most was that eLabFTW, for example, is quite practical. It makes data management easy. There’s a search function, so it is easy to find everything again. Handwritten documentation is not always accessible or readable, and you must go through every page until you find the notes you need. eLabFTW was introduced for MARIE as part of the INF project, and for me, it was a solution to a problem that I had.

RDS: Can you tell us a little more about how you use eLabFTW for documentation?

My PI, Professor [Martin] Hoffmann [Chair of Microsystems Technology at RUB], always says “Note everything that you do.” Changing one parameter in MEMS fabrication can get you quite a different result. We’re making chips out of wafers, a silicon substrate, and there’s more than twenty different processes that our chips see. If we don’t note everything, we cannot spot a mistake. Let’s say we start with one wafer and we’re happy with our results. Two months later, we want to start again and we need to replicate the exact steps to get the same results. If we don’t document everything we do, we will have to start all over again and in addition, the chips will not be comparable. 

We’re using standardized flowcharts for this at our Chair. The flowcharts are integrated into eLabFTW and I can share them with new colleagues. That makes everything so much easier because I can also share bad flowcharts. When a colleague wants to try something, I can show them exactly why it did not work in the past. eLabFTW also lets you upload e.g. microscope pictures and add them to your flowchart, so that you have all the data together in one place.

RDS: In your opinion, what are some obstacles researchers face with regard to RDM?

LS: In MARIE, we have access to RDM workshops through the INF project, but time is still an issue: When you as a researcher have a lot on your plate, you may not see the importance of research data management, especially PhD candidates. They’ve got their project, they cooperate with project partners, they have lab work, they have to work for the Chair, to take care of students, they want to go to conferences, and they have deadlines. And then doing RDM on top seems like a lot, but it is so important, especially if you want to share data.

RDS: What advice would you give to other in that regard?

LS: It’s important to be open to using new tools and trying them out. When I started using eLabFTW, I had to invest some time to figure out what all the features are and where to find them, but ultimately you get a lot of time back. It’s the same with Nextcloud. You invest some time, but it makes your work so much more efficient.

I also think that we can all profit from sharing data. Some journals ask you to share your raw data with your published paper so that others can access it. This will accelerate science because we can all work more efficiently and even people who may not be scientists but are interested in the topic can get access and maybe even share some new perspectives.

RDS: Thank you very much for your time, Lisa.

LS: Thank you for the prize and for everything you did in the INF project!