Our story

June 2024

After more than a year of intensive preparation, our engagement with the RDM community took a leap forward with the transition of RSpace to a fully open-source project. This transition naturally extends Research Space’s approach to product development, which always involved close collaboration with research organisations, communities, and researchers.

By embracing open-source principles, Research Space aims to further enhance the interoperability and capabilities of RSpace. We also continue to add exciting new capabilities that push the envelope in alignment with the latest developments in the global RDM sphere.

2019 – 2024: From ELN to Research Platform

The past five years have seen a number of exciting developments:

✔ The release of a modern, highly visual, and mobile-first inventory and sample management system that is deeply integrated with our ELN, RSpace Inventory.

✔ Development of an RSpace-supported research ecosystem, powered by integrations with more than 20 research and data management tools

✔ Deep engagement with the RDM community: active participation and contribution as contributors, advisors and collaborators to the Research Data Alliance and RDM projects and products including Dataverse, Dryad, DataCite, DMP Tool, iRODS, and the FDO Forum.

✔ Building on the earlier decision to enable easy data export and tool interoperabilty, Continued enhancements relating to FAIRification of data, including incorporation of PIDs into RSpace, support for association of controlled vocabularies with RSpace data, and functionality for maintaining the association between the PID or the controlled vocabulary with exported data.

✔ Deployment of RSpace in the regional and national Research Commons and Research Clouds, which are important vehicles for innovation in delivery of RDM services

2012 – 2018: The Beginnings of RSpace

The academic community emphasised two core priorities: "we hate vendor lock in", and "if your product does not interoperate with other tools our researchers use, they won’t use your product". As a result, the two defining elements of RSpace became ease of exporting data, and interoperability with an ever-growing ecosystem of complementary research tools, such as data repositories and file storage systems.

As development progressed, we started pilots at The University of Edinburgh and Göttingen University, and were encouraged by growing interest from other universities and research institutes.

2011: A New Hope

The University of Wisconsin Madison issued the first ever tender for a university-wide ELN. To our amazement, as a tiny company in Edinburgh, eCAT was the preferred choice by researchers. It was a bittersweet moment, however, because eCAT was in no way an Enterprise offering, lacking multi-group functionality and performance scalability.

We made the hard decision to create a successor product, inspired by eCAT but designed for flexible institutional deployment. We spent an intensive 18 months engaging with researchers, data librarians, domain specialists, and IT folks at The University of Wisconsin Madison to gather requirements for the new product, which we decided to name RSpace.

2003 – 2011: eCAT

Engagement with potential users convinced us that what was needed was not a tool for individual researchers, but something that groups – labs – could use. eCAT was developed. It was an early example of an electronic lab notebook designed for academic labs. The development of a sample management module that was deeply integrated with the ELN side of eCAT – the first ever integration of its kind – was the first of many innovations.

2003

Neuro-informatics researchers led by Nigel Goddard spun a company out of The University of Edinburgh to create a product that would enable "individual researchers to manage their data better".