EDITORIAL Ten Simple Rules for Experiments’ Provenance

Everyone needs experimental data to understand biology. Exactly how and from what the data were obtained determines an experiment’s results, specifies how it can be reproduced, and con-ditions our analyses and interpretations. These details of materials, methods, and analyses are the experiment’s provenance. Today, as it has been for hundreds of years, experimental provenance is recorded in some form of laboratory notebook. But as data migrate from the experimentalist’s mind and note-book to publication, the lab server, the archival database, or the cloud, this essential informa-tion now vanishes. Like interpretation, our ability to reproduce results depends on knowing how they were produced by others. Shorn of their immediate context, the methodological ideas and information that were perfectly transparent to the experimentalist (or computationalist!) become opportunities for error-prone reconstruction by others, even within the same group [1–3]. That reconstruction requires (repeated) private communications, rereading notebook entries, polling one’s own or a group’s collective memory, and looking at the specimens. None of those methods are reliable, and all are tedious. As big data become a reality, it will be ever more imperative to encapsulate experimenta