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. Before we start today, just some notes on recent changes in the News Digest: 1) Due to the increasing amount of news published every week, reports of conference or meetings will no longer be mentioned here. I will make exceptions when materials or other information (which can practically be reused) are part of the report. 2) The “software” section, where new versions of software were listed, will not be part of the News Digest. Instead, it will be included with the other parts, but only major releases will be discussed. So let us dive right in.

LinkML

Community Meeting: LinkML in healthcare

The recording of the LinkML community meeting in April is available, and this time focussing (more or less) a little bit on usage of LinkML in the healthcare. Daniel Kapitan is introducing PLUGIN an initiative from the Netherlands with the goal of building a technical and semantic infrastructure for federated health data space. Adam Graefe show the ideas behind RareLink which builds on LinkML to address limitations of REDCap which is broadly used in rare disease research.

Link to the PLUGIN project
Link to RareLink 

New ChemDCAT-AP version available

ChemDCAT-AP provides a way of adding domain-specific information on how a dataset was created as well as what it is about by adding domain knowledge directly into the schema. This cooperation between NFDI4Cat and NFDI4Chem is written in LinkML, and now a new version by Philip Strömert et al. is available. If this is your first time noticing ChemDCAT-AP I recommend having a look at the well documented project webpage.

Link to the software in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19659563
Link to release notes in GitHub
Link to ChemDCAT-AP webpage

NFDI Section EduTrain

Recent concept paper available

The section EduTrain of NFDI is the section that deals with training and education in research data management, as well as data literacy. In sections of the NFDI, multiple consortia work together on problems that beyond on specific field. By definition, it is not in itself discipline-specific, so I just want to shortly mention here, that the latest concept paper by Sonja Herres-Pawlis et al. of the section (from December 2025) is now available on Zenodo. If you would like to know more about the section, its working groups and deliverables in the time period between January 2026 and December 2027, check it out.

Link to the proposal in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19666250

NFDI4Chem

DMP writing made easy:

Do you need chemistry-specific support in writing your DMP? Or you need to support your researchers with their next project proposal? Or just looking for discipline-specific examples to add to your collection? NFDI4Chem got you covered! In a recent article by Fabian Fink, they providing you with information and materials on chemistry-specific DMP help, including an OER by Ann-Christin Andres et al.

Link to the article on the NFDI4Chem webpage

Improving InChI for molecular inorganics

The representation of some molecular inorganics as a string is still challenges, InChI is now taking the next steps to improve this. The latest version was accepted as beta version and is now in testing with major chemoinformatics platforms. There is also an official release which where you can test the newest version and provide some feedback. Learn more about recent and future changes in the article by Sonja Herres-Pawlis.

Link to the article on the NFDI4Chem webpage

Chemistry-specific workshop concept as OER

In the past News Digests I already mentioned that in cooperation between NFDI4Chem and The FAIR Elephant an open educational resource for a chemistry-specific RDM workshop was published. It is based on the materials for the past workshops (since 2022) by NFDI4Chem. Learn more about the structure and adaptability of the OER from an article by Annett Schröter.

Link to the article on the NFDI4Chem webpage

NFDI4Earth

Long-term data preservation: A cross-survey analysis

As a result of increasing effort to FAIR compliant data management, more and more data is published, which is great to see, but also leads to the question of long-term data preservation. Tim Schürmann and Peter Valena made a cross-survey analysis of three survey on the topic of long-term preservation. If you are working in the field (e.g. provide long-term preservation service) or are generally interested in how we can make data accessible eventually, I recommend having a look. One of the findings: There is not even an agreement between institutions on the term “long-term”. So there is a lot to do.

Link to report in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19694957

Long-term data preservation: Guideline

In addition to the cross-survey analysis, Tim Schürmann and Peter Valena published guidelines for the appraisal of long-term data preservation and archiving in the Earth System Sciences (ESS), providing insides on appraisal practices, as well as appraisal criteria for ESS data. I think it is not only relevant for ESS data. These guidelines are relevant for infrastructure providers as well as data producers (e.g. researchers) and you can also find some useful information to add to workshop materials for all the people involved in RDM teaching. One example, do you know the difference between the primary and secondary value of data? Or the informational and evidential values?

Link to the report in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19680201

The FAIR Elephant

Last week I had the pleasure of running an in-person RDM workshop for IKARUS at Jena. It was a great joy and if you are looking for some impressions check out my ko-fi page. In the future, you will find more background information and a glimpse behind the scenes of The FAIR Elephant on ko-fi. Currently, I am finishing the last slides for the next workshop, this time with the CARDS project in Berlin.

Link to the ko-fi page of The FAIR Elephant
Link to the IKARUS project
Link to the CARDS project

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.