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. This week I included a new category call “Let’s talk about it” where I am interested in your experiences and opinions, check it out and see you in the comments. So let us dive right in.

PUNCH4NFDI

Successful large-scale analysis on federate infrastructure

With Compute4PUNCH, PUNCH4NFDI is providing a central computing infrastructure. Now PUNCH4NFDI published an article about the first large-scale analysis which ran successfully on the provided infrastructure with a complete workflow documentation using REANA. A great success and wonderful example, you might want to add to your collection. This was just the first step, spread the word, maybe you know somebody in need of computing power.

Link to the article on the PUNCH4NFDI webpage

NFDI4Cat

Ontologies and chemical reactions

Thinking about how chemical reactions could be described with ontologies? Well, you first should check out the slides uploaded in Zenodo by Mark Doerr and Stefan Born, discussing exactly that and how to model it with LARAsuite. The LARAsuite is a freely and openly available collection of applications, libraries, databases and tools to plan, manage, create, monitor and evaluate (automated) processes in the laboratory.[Taken from the LARAsuite webpage]

Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18022171
Link to LARAsuite webpage

PSDI

Digital note keeping in chemical practical course: An example of University of Southampton

Flagging this for people interested in establishing digital note keeping in chemical practical courses. In the linked report, PSDI is showing how digital note keeping with OneNote was introduced into lab coursed at the University of Southampton. The report is not intended as a guidance on how you could do the same, but as a report on their experiences and lessons learned. The initial starting point was quite unique I would say and is probably different at your research institution. I highly recommend checking it out.
Maybe one comment from my side, I wouldn’t call OneNote an ELN, even though it is a tool for keeping digital notes, there are some key features missing like the possibility to properly document metadata in a human- and machine-readable way. Which for me should be the core functionality of an ELN. In the situation at University of Southampton, it makes total sense to use OneNote, I just wouldn’t call it an ELN.

Link to the report in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18256918

RSpace

Vertical integration of research tools and infrastructure

Currently, there are many tools that can support researchers with handling their data with more care, like electronic lab notebooks and data management plan tools. The problem is that those tools are often not fully integrated in the research processes. This problem was recently addressed in a presentation by Tilo Mates and Rory Macneil, the slides of the presentation are now available in Zenodo. In the presentation, they show how RSpace is dealing with the vertical interoperability, how the software helps to connect tools and enables seamless data workflows. I recommend checking this out and maybe think about the vertical interoperability at your research institution and how this could be improved.

Link to article on the RSpace webpage
Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18253482

Software

FAIRmat

NOMAD Perovskite Solar Cells Database v1.2.8
Link to release notes on GitHub
Link to software in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18347085lk

NFDI4Earth

dpabon/YAXArraysToolbox.jl: v0.3.6
Link to release notes on GitHub
Link to software in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18347797

Let’s talk about it

This week, I would like to know more about your experiences of integrating digital notes or electronic lab notebooks in practical courses. What have you learned, or maybe where are your concerns? Let us discuss in the comments below.

Outro

That is it for today. Thanks for joining me each week and exploring the field of research data management each week. 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.