I am thrilled to announce that the News Digest is back, and I brought some improvements. Firstly, I added a simple knowledge base to my website which makes it possible for you to browse and search older News Digests much easier, therefore making the findability of specific links or information much easier. Secondly, I worked together with the great Julia Klann from (Julia Klann Language Studio, https://www.juliaklannlanguagestudio.com/) to improve the structure, wording as well as look and feel.
The News Digest starts now with news from different projects and initiatives (as before), followed by information about electronic lab notebooks, and reports from meetings and at the end you find information about updates to software (that are not ELNs).

You can check out the new knowledge base aka News Digest Archive at my website: https://thefairelephant.com/news_digest_archive/.

What do you think about the News Digest Archive? Can it be useful to you?

One more point before we start. A lot has happened during the month I wasn’t posting this News Digest, and it is simply not feasible to repeat everything that happened. Therefore, in this News Digest, I will cover everything from calendar week 48 (as usual) and some highlights from the past few months.

DAPHNE4NFDI

A terminology for electron microscopy

The EM Glossary has the goal to “harmonise terminology in electron microscopy” in a poster recently published in Zenodo you can find the four measures taken to ensure this goal: 1) Community Terminology Harmonisation 2) Machine-readable OWL artifact 3) Adoption support and 4) EM Glossary Web Exploreer. The poster was presented at the DAPHNE4NFDI Annual Meeting in March 2025.

Link to poster in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15112010

DAPHNE4NFDI at DESY

Did you know that DAPHNE4NFDI is active at DESY? You can find out more about their activities there in the slides of a published talk in Zenodo. As before, the talk was part of the DAPHNE4NFDI Annual Meeting in March 2025.

Link to presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15797190

Using AI to improve findability in the PaNOSC Data Portal

PaNOSC Data Portal is the data portal of the Photon and Neutron Open Science Cluster and with the project PaN-Finder the existing functionalities will be extended by introducing an AI-powered search tool. To learn more about the presentation, check out the uploaded to Zenodo.

Link to presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17471792

NFDI4Cat

Major changes to the voc4cat

A new version of the voc4cat-tool was published (see section software) and therefore also the workflow to maintain the vocabulary was updated and is now available in Zenodo. Follow the link for more information:

Link to workflow in Zenodo with DOI: h10.5281/zenodo.17764355

PSDI

Not sure what PSDI is and what they are all about? Then check out the latest “Introduction to PSDI” video on their YouTube-Channel. Short and to the point:

Electronic Lab Notebooks

eLabFTW

Version 5.3, a quality of life update

The release-video of eLabFTW version 5.3 is already a month old, but I needed to include it in this News Digest. The new version brings many quality-of-life improvements, for users and admins, as well as streamlining the overall experience in the electronic lab notebook. Just to give some examples: the templates for experiments and resource are now accessible via their tabs, and you can now book multiple resources at once, to just name two examples. Since there are some changes to the UI (e.g. the structure of an experiment) I highly recommend watching the video if you are an eLabFTW user, and if you are an admin for an eLabFTW instance, sharing the video with your users. What are your thoughts on the changes?

Link to eLabFTW v5.3 release-video on YouTube

Recording of community Meeting IX available:

From PASTA-ELN to eLabFTW: Synchronizing data between ELNs

There are a lot of different ELN solutions out there with different approaches, goals and scope, since scientist have different needs in ELN solutions. This leads to the challenge that we need to be able to share or synchronize data between different ELNs to enable collaboration or even get the most out of each tool. During the community meeting Steffen Brinckmann demonstrated how data synchronization between the electronic lab notebook PASTA-ELN and eLabFTW works. Showing the possibilities as well as limitations. If you are interested in the interoperability of data in different ELN solution, you should definitely check out this part of the recording of the community meeting of eLabFTW. By the way, PASTA-ELN as well as eLabFTW are part of the ELN Consortium.

Artificial intelligence in ELNs

In the second part of the meeting Nandjafot Mendy of emerit science was presenting the idea of introducing AI into electronic lab notebooks. AI could help this generating protocols (or templates), annotate data and experiments with information for databases, analysing data or finding information and answers faster in the ELN. What’s your take to AI in your electronic lab notebook? Yay or Nay?

Future UI changes in eLabFTW

More and more functionalities were added to eLabFTW, which lead to the point that the documentation of an experiment can now be quite long, in the sense that you need to scroll a lot to find the information you are looking for or access a specific feature of the documentation. Therefore, eLabFTW is discussing some major changes to the UI, where you can access the different parts of the experiment documentation via tabs. This is your time to get involved and provide feedback on the ideas. Check out the video below at minute () and/or go to the GitHub discussion on this topic

Link to the GitHub discussion about the UI redesign

Meeting reports

FAIRmat

The 7th FAIRmat User Meeting, with the title Collaboration in Action, took place. You can find a short report on the news page of FAIRmat

Link to the report on the FAIRmat webpage

NFDI4Chem

How can we get to a “sustainable, coordinated landscape of community-driven standards?” To answer this, the DIgSustain3 workshop took place in London. You can now read more about the planned Coalition for the Sustainability of Digital Data Standards in the Chemical Sciences, their goals and next steps in a short report on the NFDI4Chem webpage.

Link to the article on the NFDI4Chem webpage

The theory of interoperable file formats is great, but is it actually working?  This was tested and improved for metabolomics and proteomics data at the BioHackathon Europe within the project Metabolomics and proteomics file formate interoperability fest. You can now read the report at the NFDI4Chem webpage:

Link to the article on the NFDI4Chem webpage

PUNCH4NFDI

The annual meeting of PUNCH4NFDI took place in Potsdam and if you need an update on what topics are in focus for PUNCH4NFDI you should take a look at the short report on their website.

Link to the report on the PUNCH4NFDI webpage.

Software updates

FAIRmat

Electronic Parsers Plugin for NOMAD – version v1.0.12 available
Link to release notes on GitHub
Link to software on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17699318

NOMAD Measurements Plugin for NOMAD – version v1.3.4 available
Link to release notes on GitHub
Link to software in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17752206

NOMAD CAMELS – version v1.10.6 available
Link to release notes on GitHub
Link to software in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17726097

NFDI4Cat

voc4cat-tool – version v0.10.0 available (!breaking changes, XLSX templates from earlier versions not usable)
Link to release notes on GitHub
Link to software in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17764303

Outro

That’s it for today. Thank you for reading the News Digest. I am thrilled to be back, and see you next week!

Benjamin