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. I have written this week’s News Digest with great joy. There are so many fantastic examples for successfully establish research data management solutions and tools. So much to learn from, add to your workshop materials and spread the word. So let us dive right in.

FAIRmat

Handling data with NOMAD: Recordings of user meeting available

In November 2025, the 7th FAIRmat user meeting took place, as I reported. Now six recordings of talks are available at the YouTube-Channel of FAIRmat (the playlist is linked below). All six of these videos are great and worth your time, and you can find an overview on the news page at the FAIRmat webpage. I want to highlight two of the videos here: The first one is the talk by Pepe Márquez providing an overview of recent developments within NOMAD as well as introducing some use cases (first video). This is a great introduction to all the other talks and provides you with a short overview of NOMAD and the developments, so it is a great refresher of the work of FAIRmat.
The other recording I want to highlight is by Marcel Risch and Carla Terboven discussing the usage of NOMAD for electrocatalysis data. In the talk, two perspectives are given, the perspective of the researcher using the tool, and the perspective of the data steward. I think we need more of these presentations, showing both sides of implementing new tools to improve data handling. Carla Terboven also discusses a way to motivate researcher to provide (meta)data: they implement (automatic) analysis based on the provided information, that was inaccessible before. So, adding data in a structured way benefits the researchers and motivates them. Great talk, highly recommended.
Also check out the other talks, there are good examples which you can include in your workshops and talks to show how data handling can be improved with tools like NOMAD. The talks include topics like handling multidimensional time-resolved photoemission data, solid-state NMR data, handling fabrication processes and much more.

Link to the news overview at the FAIRmat webpage
Link to the playlist for the 7th FAIRmat user meeting at the FAIRmat YouTube-Channel

New to NOMAD? Start here

You have never heard of NOMAD and need some basic information as well as want to try it yourself? Or you just want to update your slides about NOMAD? Then check out the latest uploads by Ahmed E. Mansour to the FAIRmat Zenodo community. The first link leads to the slides of a presentation about NOMAD for the CRC 1357 Microplastics. The second link is leads to the slides of a hands-on tutorial for using NOMAD.

Link to presentation of NOMAD in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18232263
Link to hands-on tutorial of NOMAD in Zendo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18232371

NFDI4Cat

Detailed information about Repo4Cat

With Repo4Cat, NFDI4Cat is providing a repository for catalysis data and the catalysis research community. Now an article was published providing further information about the creation process, from selecting the software to the maintenance. Unfortunately, I could not access the paper itself, but I am sure it is worth a read. Maybe let me know in the comments if you have read it and can provide further information for other readers here.

Link to the news on the webpage of NFDI4Cat

NFDI4Chem

FAIR4Chem awardees announced

The winners of the FAIR4Chem Award 2026 were announced, so congratulation to Marius Michael Engler and Johannes Schenk. You can find out more about the awardees at the webpage of NFDI4Chem, and I am pretty sure we will see interviews and/or talks of both awardees in the future. If you are looking for more examples of great data publications for your talks and workshops, these could be great additions to your collections. I definitely added them to mine.

Link to the official announcement at the NFDI4Chem webpage

The way to a centralised ELN solution: Example of Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg

Most of you reading this News Digest are aware that establishing new tools to handle data in a FAIR way (like electronic lab notebooks) costs time, effort and money. NFDI4Chem has now published a report on the implementation process of the electronic lab notebook Chemotion ELN at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg as a central service. From the first idea to the day-to-day usage, discussing advantages but also challenges. It is a great read, and I specially recommend it for two cases: You are in the process of establishing a centralised ELN (or other software) solution and want to learn from others. Or you are still in the process of convincing the people that a centralised solution benefits all and are looking for some arguments as well as gaining knowledge about possible problems.

Link to the article at the NFDI4Chem webpage

NFDI4Earth

In 2024 NFDI4Earth published their Recommendations for Earth System Sciences Metadata Provision in a working paper in Zenodo. Now the recommendations were updated. In 2024, a 4-step approach was proposed: 1) Implement a metadata profile or provide a mapping to a metadata profile for harvesting 2) Structure the metadata content and assure the quality 3) Define a licence for the metadata 4) Provide an interface using a standardised web-based protocol.
Now they added three more steps and updated step 4) to: 4) Provide an interface using a standardised web-based protocol and interface description format 5) Implement a linking to machine-readable metadata 6) Register the data repository or catalogue in re3data 7) Use the NFDI4Earth Label to highlight FAIRness achievements for the repository.
For more details, check out the updated white paper yourself.

Link to the working paper in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17542168

PSDI

Estimating drug solubility with a machine-learning approach

Interested in machine-learning (ML) and how it could help to estimate drug solubility? PSDI reported about a scientific article about the usage of ML to estimate the solubility of drugs in organic solvents. It is definitely or more specific topic, but if you are working in the field of chemistry and perhaps are interested in developments in machine-learning, then check it out, the article is open-access.

Link to the report on the PSDI webpage

Outro

So many new things, I hope there was something interesting for you. That is it for today. Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

Benjamin

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