Electronic Lab Notebook Requirements in Korea
Electronic lab notebook requirements in Korea are set by the Guideline on Lab Notebooks for National R&D Programs(‘국가연구개발사업 연구노트 지침’, MSIT Notice No. 2021-102): every research record must be traceable to a recording date, a named recorder, and an intact revision history, preserved for up to thirty years — and electronic notes are held to the same evidentiary standard as paper.
The question teams actually ask, though, sounds nothing like that. It sounds like: “We already keep all our experiment records in a shared drive — isn’t that our electronic lab notebook?” This guide is the answer to that question. It sets out what the guideline requires in its own words, then applies those requirements to the shared-drive assumption directly — because the two do not match, and the mismatch is exactly where records lose their force when a verification visit, a misconduct allegation, or a patent dispute arrives.
What the Guideline Actually Requires
The guideline does not hand institutions a form to fill in. Its structure is a delegation with teeth: “the requirements for lab notebooks shall be determined by the head of the R&D institution in its own regulation”(Art. 7(1)) — and then the guideline names what that regulation must guarantee. The head of the institution must be able to confirm the record’s date and its recorder (Art. 7(2)), and must allow notebooks in various formats — paper, electronic notes, audio, or video (Art. 7(3)). Note what that ordering implies: the format is free, but the verifiability is not.
From that anchor, the rest follows. Entries must record objective facts without falsification or alteration, so that a third party can use them to reproduce the research process and its results (Art. 8(6)). The notebook belongs to the institution that managed its creation, not to the researcher who filled it in (Art. 9). The default retention period is thirty years from the project end date (Art. 10(3)). And the responsible ministry can inspect whether an institution’s notebook system actually operates — not merely whether the regulation exists on paper (Art. 13).
Read together, three properties do all the work: when the record was written, who wrote it, and what has happened to it since. Everything an electronic system needs — timestamps, attribution, audit trails — exists to prove those three things. Which brings us to the shared drive.
Is a Shared Drive a Valid Electronic Lab Notebook?
Here is the test applied honestly to a typical shared folder — Google Drive, Notion, a network drive; it barely matters which. Can the institution answer the three questions?
- When was each entry recorded?It can’t say. A file’s modified date tells you the last time anyone touched the file, not when each entry was made — and it resets whenever a file is moved, renamed, or re-uploaded. Nothing in a shared drive establishes that an entry was written on the day the work happened, which is precisely the thing a backfilled notebook fails to prove.
- Who recorded it?Only down to an account, and accounts are not authors. Passwords get shared, collaborators come and go, and an edit attributed to a lab manager’s login proves nothing about who ran the experiment. The guideline goes further and splits the roles: a recorder who writes, and a separate confirmer who reviews and signs (Art. 2). A shared drive has neither role and no signature step at all.
- What has changed since? Version history in consumer cloud tools is a convenience feature, not an evidence trail. Files can be deleted, replaced, and re-uploaded; histories reset with them. A correction in a compliant notebook stays visible forever. A correction in a shared document can simply overwrite the original, leaving no trace that a correction ever happened.
None of this makes shared drives useless — they are excellent for collaboration. The point is narrower and colder: a storage location is not a notebook system. When the record is actually needed — a research misconduct investigation, a patent fight over who invented what first, a ministry inspection — the questions will be exactly the three above, and “it’s all in the Drive” does not answer any of them.
Electronic Notes Face the Same Standard as Paper
The mirror image of the shared-drive assumption is the belief that electronicmeans a lower bar — that “real” notebooks are paper and digital notes are a relaxed cousin. The guideline says the opposite: by listing paper, electronic, audio, and video as equal formats, it applies the same three tests to all of them (Art. 7(3)). What changes is only the mechanism of proof. A bound notebook proves sequence and authorship with pre-numbered pages and ink; an electronic notebook must prove the same things with system-level timestamps, per-user attribution, access control, and an alteration-resistant history.
Corrections make the parallel concrete. On paper, you cross out with a single line — visible forever. In a compliant electronic system, every edit leaves a preserved prior version; entries are never silently overwritten. In a shared document, overwriting is the default behavior. The medium was never the requirement. The requirement is that the record’s history cannot be rewritten without leaving evidence of the rewrite.
What an Electronic Lab Notebook System Actually Needs
This reframes the selection question. “Which electronic lab notebook should we use?” is less useful than “what must the system be able to prove?” A system that meets the guideline’s intent provides, at minimum:
- Server-side timestamps on every entry — set by the system, not the author’s clock.
- Attribution of every entry and every edit to a named individual, on accounts that are never shared.
- An audit trail that preserves prior versions: corrections visible, deletions logged.
- A confirmer workflow — entries reviewed and signed by someone other than the recorder (Art. 2).
- Access control and a reading log, so the institution can show who has consulted the record (Art. 11).
- Retention and backup aligned to the institution’s preservation period — thirty years by default (Art. 10(3)).
For what goes insideeach entry — the content standard, the recorder and confirmer roles, and a checklist you can run against your team’s notes this week — see how to write a lab notebook that survives an audit.
FAQ
Can Google Drive or Notion replace an electronic lab notebook?
As a rule, no. The guideline does not name tools; it names properties — recording date, recorder identity, tamper-evidence — and generic cloud storage lacks the mechanisms to guarantee any of the three. Unless your institution builds an auditable process on top that enforces attribution and preserves history, records kept in shared drives will not hold up when they are checked.
Are electronic lab notebooks mandatory for Korean national R&D?
A notebook of some form is required, but the format is flexible: paper, electronic, audio, or video (Art. 7(3)). Electronic is not mandatory — it simply has to meet the same evidentiary tests as paper. Certain project types where a notebook adds little, such as preliminary surveys or workforce training, are allowed to substitute the annual or final report (Art. 8(3)); that exception is narrower than teams hope, so check your institution’s regulation before relying on it.
How long must research records be preserved?
Thirty years from the end of the project is the default (Art. 10(3)), with institutions allowed to set different periods by project type in their own regulations. The record is expected to outlive everyone who could be asked about it — plan storage and format migration accordingly.
Building those properties out of a shared drive, naming conventions, and trust is exactly the fragility the guideline exists to prevent. If you would rather start from a system where attribution, timestamps, and tamper-evident history are the defaults, pricing has the plan breakdown.