It is already week 16 of 2024, time is flying by. So let use check out what was going on in the past week.

DAPHNE4NFDI & ErUM-Data-Hub:

ErUM-Data-Hub and DAPHNE4NFDI published a poster where they show how these two projects complement each other. You can check out the poster here.

FAIRmat – User meeting

In June, the fourth FAIRmat user meeting will be held in Erlangen and you can find more information about it on the LinkedIn Event Page. They have defined five topics which they want to focus on by providing workshops. I like that next to workshops about NOMAD, NOMAD Oasis and NOMAD CAMELS, there will also be a workshop on Data literacy in physics curriculum.

NFDI4Chem – Interview introducing an ELN

NFDI4Chem published another interview, this time with Prof. Ivan Vilotijević from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Prof. Ivan Vilotijević talks about the reasons for establishing an ELN, how to do it and which challenges they had to face. I find the answer to the question of who is using the ELN in the working group quite interesting:

All active members of the research group use the ELN. Research interns do still use regular paper-based notebooks as I find this experience important for their learning but as they become more integrated into the group and our research projects, they start using the ELN.

– Prof. Ivan Vilotijević

You can read the full interview here.

PUNCH4NFDI – Newsletter

The 8th newsletter by PUNCH4NFDI was published, and you can find it here. As always with newsletters, they are too long to cover them in this news digest and some of the things were reported in older news digests already, but you should check it out-

PSDI – Open & Transparent Research in Physical Sciences

There is a new video upload where Dr. Nicola Knight and Dr. Samantha Pearman-Kanza talk about promotion open & transparent research practices in the physical sciences. During the talk, they also discussed different barriers. I recommend checking out the whole video here, but I specially want to point you to the part where they’re discussing one of the biggest barriers, people: 

As always with the slides from the PSDI talks, they look great, and you can also find them on Zenodo.

Outro

Today I would like to close with words from Dr. Nicola Knight from the mentioned PSDI talk:

…we talked a lot about things like software, tools and standards, they’re great but they’re not particularly useful if people don’t actually understand why these are important or how they can actually utilize them, so a major strand of the work that we’re doing is around the provision of training and guidance.

– Dr. Nicola Knight

I couldn’t agree more. There are great developments in FAIR research data management, but if we are not succeeding in teaching people why these things are so important, then we will not succeed with the goal of FAIR data. The same is true for guiding and supporting researchers. This is precisely what I try to offer with The FAIR Elephant: Support and training to get step-by-step closer to FAIR RDM that benefits the researchers.

As always, thanks for reading and until next time!