The data inside an organisation's ELN is hugely valuable to it, and has been produced at considerable cost. To lock this data inside a proprietary format, where access can only be gained by the purchase of third party products, is something that no responsible records manager should do willingly.

ELN vendors owe it to their customers to provide a simple, unencumbered mechanism for getting the data in and out of an ELN; likewise, purchasers of ELNs owe it to their organisations to insist that such a mechanism is supplied as part of the core product.

Why access to ELN data is needed

Typically, companies are concerned about their ability to access ELN records for a number of reasons:

1. in support of a patent or a patent interference
2. for regulatory compliance
3. to transfer the records to another ELN, when the existing system is either upgraded or replaced
4. for scientific reasons: for example, taking historic work and applying new techniques

Another vital consideration when deploying and using ELNs is the need, in the future to access the records they hold.

CENSML aims to address all these issues.

Archive mechanisms: PDF and CENSML

Currently, PDF is a common format for archiving scientific reports; its closeness to paper makes it comfortable for the legal profession and the FDA.

Unfortunately, though, PDF's paper metaphor means that the underlying scientific data is lost. Specifically, behind any kind of printed report, there is generally a large amount of detailed data and context which is not preserved in any meaningful way. Therefore, the same feature that makes PDF attractive for patenting and regulatory compliance causes problems when access is needed to the underlying scientific information and associated "meta data".

This is where CENSML will play a part: as a mechanism for encoding the data that is stored in an ELN. In this, it is completely complementary to PDF and other methods of encoding data; CENSML puts a wrapper around existing data so it can easily be moved from one ELN to another.

You can embed XML into PDF files, and some CENSML implementations may well choose to do so. However, the most common use will be to place the PDF in the context of an overall CENSML packet.

For all these reasons, then, CENSML implementations will likely use PDF as one of the basic file types for storing ELN information.