Agilent Technologies and Surety have announced that Maquet has selected the Agilent Openlab ELN electronic notebook bundled with Surety's Absoluteproof third-party, digital time-stamping service.
The combined solution is said to bolster Maquet's long-term ability to protect and legally defend the authenticity and ownership of its scientific intellectual property (IP).
Maquet, a manufacturer of medical products, therapies and services for operating rooms and intensive care units, purchased the system to replace paper laboratory notebooks.
To protect scientific IP, Maquet personnel were regularly shuttling the notebooks to an off-site notary office to be manually time stamped.
By implementing an automated digital notarisation process, Maquet expects to streamline the efficiency and effectiveness of this process.
The company said it was also seeking a tool to facilitate collaboration between research teams in France and Germany.
Bruce von Herrmann, vice-president and general manager at Agilent Software and Informatics, said: 'Openlab ELN enables our customers to capture, manage and share their research.
'The integration of Absoluteproof secures corporate IP at the time of inception, automating the documentation of when patents are submitted,' he added.
Agilent Openlab ELN provides scientists with a scalable, integrated platform for creating, capturing, managing and sharing information in an increasingly complex global environment.
The open-architecture, customised solution facilitates multi-discipline interaction, simplifies and accelerates research and development discovery, and streamlines data management.
Openlab ELN v4.1 introduces experimental templates, enabling scientists to customise the view of the experimental desktop.
Agilent said it has also streamlined the analytical request workflow by reducing the number of steps between request and result, which improves laboratory productivity.
A specific analytical module for documenting analytical methods, generating sequence files and capturing results has been added to facilitate report creation across one or more samples and techniques.
Absoluteproof digitally time stamps research data flowing within the Openlab ELN, providing substantial evidentiary support should the authenticity or ownership of time-stamped records be legally challenged.
A secure digital time stamp (in other words, a trusted time stamp) verifiably seals a record, enabling its time and content integrity to be independently proven at any time.
Additionally, researcher identity is captured and sealed alongside the content during the collaboration workflow, increasing the defensibility of the overall 'sign and witness' process.
