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Comment by cptcobalt | Hacker News Reader

As someone who doesn't come from the educational world, this idea confuses me:

  Most importantly, your lab notebook is not yours.

Many of the ideas presented on slide 4 seem a bit antithetical to a bit of the reason why someone would keep a good notebook. If I wasn't going to keep it, why would I bother? Or is this based off the idea that the institution is paying for it, therefore they own your research/knowledge?

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Yes. It's theoretically a legal document of all of the work done in a lab.

Note: as the slides mention you can (and probably should) keep copies of your notebooks.

A loose analogy is that a lab notebook in this context is more like a courtroom transcript than a personal journal. It's a primary record of experimental data and procedures. Also there can be multiple people running a single experiment and recording data in a common lab notebook.

Because they are part of what you're being paid to do in that case.

Being paid to do something does not automatically make all that is involved in the doing of that thing property of they payee.

If I am being paid to produce some deliverable product or deliverable service, then the infrastructure used to create that may very much not be a deliverable or property of the customer.

My point isn't "you are wrong", but rather, there is not necessarily an automatic assignment of such intermediate products. And depending on the type of work (and/or customers / employers you're working for), the answer may vary. Law, custom, employment contracts, and/or engagement contracts will almost certainly play a role here.

If that governing rule is "you shall maintain a project journal and that journal is considered work product and property of the employer", then yes, that is part of what you're being paid to do. Though this may still give you rights to the contents of that journal.

In his case the point is that the engineering notebooks are parts of the deliverables you're paid to produce: They're documentation that staff are very explicitly trained to and expected to produce in a format that is conducive to e.g. handovers as part of their normal duties, and the expectations of this are very clearly set out.

If you wish to also produce a personal engineering notebook for your own personal purposes, then that is a separate issue. The very fact that this document sets this out as a task that involves producing a notebook that is not yours makes it a work product. If you put things in there you don't think your employer should have rights to, then that is your fault for putting it in there instead of in your personal notes.

The salient datum is not "being paid" but the contractual obligation.

Fault and negotiating advantage are a deeper issue. I'll note these though I'm not interested in going into it further presently.

"being paid" is here used to point out that they are part of the duties of the job covered by the contract. If they aren't part of your contracted work, you're not being paid for it.

There's nothing to go further into - these are very straight-forward issues when they are presented to you as a part of your duties. They are less so if you on personal initiative decide to keep additional notes for your own use, but the context here is a presentation to employees presenting instructions for how to carry out this work duty, so that hardly applies in this case.

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