nanalLabs Blog"You should keep a lab notebook" is common advice, but it is surprisingly hard to find out what makes a notebook compliant. This post summarizes the requirements from the primary source — Korea's National R&D Research Note Directive (in Korean). Regulations change, so always check the original text before relying on it.
Why lab notebooks matter
A lab notebook is not a memo — it is legal and administrative evidence. It matters in three situations:
- Government-funded R&D — under Korea's National R&D Innovation Act framework, research notes are the baseline evidence of how the work was actually performed. If misconduct is alleged, they decide whether the work was done in good faith.
- Patent disputes and prior-use rights — "we were building this first" carries no weight without objective, dated records.
- Technology transfer and trade secrets — a record of what was created, when, and by whom is the starting point of both valuation and protection.
The three requirements for electronic notebooks
The directive divides research notes into paper and electronic, and requires electronic notebooks to provide:
| Requirement | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Signature authentication of author and reviewer | Who wrote it, and who checked it, must be electronically verifiable |
| Automatic recording of entry date and time | Timestamps must be recorded without human hands touching them |
| Tamper detection | It must be possible to confirm the record was not altered afterwards |
All three converge on a single principle: the record must be impossible to fabricate after the fact. A document with hand-typed dates, or a cloud document without an edit trail, cannot satisfy this no matter how diligently it is kept.
The gap for private-sector labs
Korea operates a public timestamp certification service for research notes, but it serves institutions performing national R&D. A corporate research lab that does not take government projects is outside that infrastructure — it must arrange timestamping and tamper detection on its own. The patent office's trade-secret original-proof service registers individual files, but it is manual and per-file — impractical for records that accumulate every day.
A self-check for your lab
- Are entry timestamps recorded automatically?
- If a record is edited later, does the edit show?
- Can the author and reviewer be electronically authenticated?
- Can you prove all of the above to a third party — not with your own server's logs, but in an externally verifiable way?
The last item is the hardest. A timestamp on your own server is self-certification, and it is weak in a dispute. The anchor has to live somewhere you cannot touch — a certified document authority, or a public ledger such as a blockchain — before "even we cannot alter it" becomes provable.