Welcome to the News Digest – RDM in Natural Science. Each week, I explore the latest developments in research data management, focusing specifically on natural sciences, and provide a concise overview. So let us dive right in.
NFDI4Chem & The FAIR Elephant
New OER published
I am thrilled and proud to announce the new open educational resource (OER) with the title “FAIR Chemistry Data: A Research Data Management Workshop Concept” was published. The OER is a product of a cooperation between NFDI4Chem and The FAIR Elephant. It was a long time in the making and is now finally there. I want to specially thank Annett Schröter, Ann-Christin Andres and Fabian Fink for the great teamwork. It is always fun working with you. With the OER, we hope we provided a well documented, easy to reuse and adapt concept with discipline-specific examples (licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal). Check it out, add it to your workshop resources, share it with colleagues and let us know what you think. Maybe you have also some workshop materials you want to publish as OER but just don’t have the time? Contact me, perhaps together we can finally publish it!
Link to the OER in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19084779
FAIRmat
FAIRmat II recommended for funding
Congratulations to FAIRmat! The NFDI Expert Committee recommended the project for funding. Read more about it on the news page of FAIRmat.
Link to the news page at the FAIRmat webpage
Activities in NeXus standardization
NeXus is a common data format, and FAIRmat helped and helps to expand it. You can learn more about it in two presentations by Lukas Pielsticker. I specially recommend checking out the presentations as well as FAIRmats involvement in extending the standards for all people looking into data format standardization and the challenges of accepting new standards.
Link to presentation “Introduction to FAIRmat, NeXus, and NOMAD” in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19189445
Link to presentation “FAIRmat and its activities in NeXus standardization” in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19168949
MaRDI
Newsletter: All about gamification
The latest newsletter of MaRDI is all about gamification and the efforts of MaRDI to provide a different access point to the topic of research data management. You can find three short stories about their online games and I recommend checking out the new game “Causal Coffee & Casual Cats”, can you solve all the quests?
Link to the game “Causal Coffee & Casual Cats”
Get a view behind the curtain of “Causal Coffee & Casual Cats” in the interview of Christiane Görgen with Bianca Violet.
Check out the full article with additional information:
PUNCH4NFDI
PUNCH4NFDI at Astroinformatics 2026 conference
Members of PUNCH4NFDI joint the Astroinformatics 2026 conference in February 2026, and presented services like Compute4PUNCH”. Read more about the event at the PUNCH4NFDI webpage.
Link to the article on the PUNCH4NFDI webpage
Software
FAIRmat
Pynxtools: A Python Library for NeXus-Compliant Experimental Data Conversion and Integration with NOMAD Platform v0.13.2
Link to release notes in GitHub
Link to software in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19250270
NOMAD Simulations v0.7.0
Link to release notes in GitHub
Link to software in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19217293
Outro
That is it for today. Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
Benjamin
If you find these weekly overviews useful, please like, and share them with your colleagues and if you want to support me even more, you can go over to my ko-fi page and buy a bag of peanuts for The FAIR Elephant. Your support is much appreciated.