Comment by bkanber
7 years ago
Professional lab researchers use physical notebooks because they are lo-tech and immutable. A pre-numbered page in a bound book can't be torn out surreptitiously. Pencil and white-out are disallowed. They're simple and tamper-evident, which is very important if you're designing pharmaceuticals, for instance.
Obviously there's crypto, signing, checksums, and so on, that you can use on computers. But when the answer is as simple as writing in pen in a pre-numbered, bound notebook, and having your supervisor sign your notes, might as well just do that.
Definitely good points. And every field has its own level of security risk. In my case, the greatest risk is me not being able to figure out what I did in the past. I'm not in a tightly regulated / audited industry.
It is not only regulation. There might be a legal fight over a discovery and for this there's nothing like a tamper-evident paper document to prove that a lab did X on date Y.