LabCollector Introduces ELN Consortium-Compatible Import & Export

Paris, France – August 2026 – LabCollector, the leading laboratory information management platform, today announced new ELN Consortium-compatible import and export capabilities within its Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) module. The new functionality is built on the ELN Consortium archive format (.eln, based on RO-Crate 1.1), the recognized open standard for portable research data.

The new capabilities enable laboratories to exchange notebook content across compatible ELN platforms, improving interoperability and facilitating data migration. Researchers can import archives into new or existing LabCollector books with just a few clicks, while the export side allows LabCollector notebooks to be shared outward to other ELN Consortium-compatible systems.

As the scientific community increasingly demands open, vendor-neutral formats for research data, this development reinforces LabCollector's commitment to open standards, data portability, and collaborative scientific research.

How It Works

The import process is designed to be simple, safe, and faithful to the original notebook structure. It follows three straightforward steps:

1. 1

   Export an .eln archive

   Export an .eln archive from any ELN Consortium-compatible notebook — a zipped RO-Crate 1.1 bundle of experiments, pages, and attachments.

2. 2

   Pick a target book

   Choose to create a new book from the archive or append to an existing LabCollector book. Nothing in the target book is modified.

3. 3

   Import in a few clicks

   Import: experiments, pages, and attachments are recreated automatically inside LabCollector, preserving structure and metadata.

The import process automatically recreates experiments, pages, and attachments while ensuring that existing content remains untouched. Archives up to 50 MB can be uploaded, and admin rights are required to perform an import — keeping notebook integrity and governance in the right hands.

On the export side, the same standard is available directly from the ELN action bar. A single click on the Export .eln button packages the current book — its experiments, pages, and attachments — into a portable .eln archive that can be opened by any ELN Consortium-compatible notebook, making sharing and migration symmetric and bidirectional.

Key Benefits

The new .eln import and export capabilities deliver several key advantages:

"Open standards are the foundation of trustworthy, collaborative science. By embracing the ELN Consortium .eln format, LabCollector ensures that laboratory knowledge never gets locked inside a single platform — researchers can move their notebook content in and out of LabCollector freely, safely, and without losing structure or context. This is interoperability by design."

A Commitment to Open Standards

The ELN Consortium .eln format is a community-driven, open specification built on RO-Crate 1.1, a structured way to package research objects with their metadata so they can be understood across systems. By supporting the format on both import and export, LabCollector joins a broader movement toward vendor-neutral research data — where notebooks can be shared between institutions, collaborators, and platforms without proprietary conversion or data loss.

This matters most in collaborative and multi-site research, in migrations away from legacy or end-of-life ELNs, and in any context where long-term data portability and reproducibility are required.

Who Benefits

The new capabilities are particularly valuable for organizations that need to exchange or migrate notebook content across platforms and partners: