The high cost of scientific software and its lack of accommodation to what scientists really need were the reason we came up with Sparklix electronic lab notebook and its business model.

Apparently a lot of today's scientific software is developed by engineers who know nothing about the scientific areas they are targeting, trying to create yet another CRUD or CRM-like application with scientific flavor. What we attempted to do with Sparklix is to bring the researchers an experience which would be as close as possible to their paper notebook, because this is the way they are thinking and this is how they expect their software would work. To get to good results our team is composed of both developers and scientists, and this makes the software fit the actual need and not remain in "thoughtland".

Regarding cost we made it simple - the product is free, and additional services (such as on-site installations) cost money. This is the direction the internet is going to, we see no reason in charging money for the basic software in today's world of Google, Facebook and Twitter.

This is exactly what SparkLab aims to solve, take a look here: http://sparklix.com/demo-movie It's free for academic and non-profit organizations. Personal free edition will be up later this year.

You may be interested in SparkLab 360: http://www.sparklix.com/product/sparklab . Aside of document management it also provides functionality specific for biological research such as reaction calculators and experimental data analysis, and allows you to associate documents with your lab protocols and experiments. It's very "Web 2.0-ish" and cheap (free for academic use).