Electronic lab notebooks — and where jnar fits.

An electronic lab notebook is software that replaces the paper lab notebook: a researcher records experiments, observations, results, and sign-offs in a searchable, time-stamped digital record. Many ELNs add inventory tracking, a molecular-biology registry, and team review workflows on top of that core notebook.

No — and that's deliberate. jnar is an open protocol registry, the layer for the methods themselves: versioned, public, citable protocols with a visible fix history, negative results as first-class objects, and ORCID attribution. An ELN records the experiments you run; jnar records and improves the protocols you run them with. They sit alongside each other rather than competing.

It depends what you mean by free. Several ELNs offer a free academic tier (often scoped to a notebook plus molecular-biology tools), and open-source ELNs are free to self-host if you can run the server. There isn't one universal answer — it turns on whether you need the full notebook, inventory, and registry, or just an open place to write and share protocols. jnar is free to start for the protocol layer specifically: reading, browsing, contributing, and authoring in a single-person workspace cost nothing, and your first AI doc→protocol conversion is on us.

Yes — several ELNs are open-source and self-hostable, which lets a lab keep full control of its data on its own infrastructure. Worth being precise about two different meanings of "open", though: open-source means you can run and modify the code, usually behind your own login; open in jnar's sense means the protocols are public, citable, and improvable by the community by default. jnar is open in the second sense — the methods are out in the open, not just the codebase.

Most labs that adopt jnar keep whatever notebook they already use. The ELN stays the system of record for experiments; jnar becomes the open, versioned home for the protocols — the part that's worth sharing, citing, and improving across the lab and beyond. You can import an existing methods document into jnar in one step, so adopting it doesn't mean retyping anything.

Start from the job. If you need a bound experiment record with inventory and a registry, evaluate the full ELNs — weigh the free academic tiers, whether the data is self-hostable, and how you migrate out later. If the real need is open, reproducible, shareable methods — the way funders and journals increasingly expect — a protocol registry is a better fit than locking methods inside a private notebook. Many labs run both.