News Digest – RDM in Natural Science: Week 23, 2025
Welcome to the latest News Digest! Each week, I explore the latest developments in research data management, focusing specifically on natural sciences, and provide a concise overview. Today there are numerous updates, specially from the electronic lab notebooks eLabFTW and RSpace. So let us dive right in!
Video on version 5.2 available
The people of eLabFTW published a new release-video for version 5.2. In the video, they demonstrate and explain some of the changes as well as new features. If you are working with eLabFTW, or want to use it in the future, you should check it out. There are some great new tools to support the use of the electronic lab notebook in the field of natural science. If you would like to know more, you can also check the eLabFTW blog post from April.
NOMAD Catalysis App released
A new way of interacting with catalysis data in NOMAD is now available, the NOMAD Catalysis App. The NOMAD Catalysis App offers “customizable dashboards and interactive plots” to make the exploration of the data as easy as possible. Check it out right now and read more about it in the news section on the webpage of FAIRmat or in the documentation (all is linked below).
Link to the news page of FAIRmat
Link to the NOMAD Catalysis App
Link to the NOMAD Catalysis App documentation
Recording available: The engineering of research
On the YouTube channel of FAIRmat, there is now a recording from March 2025 of a talk by Prof. Helge Stein about “The engineering of research by horizontal and vertical integration” available. Very interesting talk about the interaction of different methods, devices and how automation, as well as machine learning, can support the research process.
Recap: Annual Meeting on Reaction Engineering
NFDI4Cat joined the Annual Meeting on Reaction Engineering in Würzburg with a workshop and a booth this year and has published a short report on their webpage.
Lab automation and RSpace: Stammtisch recording available
In the NFDI4Chem Stammtisch in January, Tim Meyer and Tilo Mathes talked about lab automation with SILA (Standardisation in Laboratory Automation) in combination with the electronic lab notebook RSpace. In case you are not familiar with the SILA consortium, I have linked to the specific timestamp in the video below where it is introduced. That said, the entire video is quite interesting, so I recommend watching the whole thing. For more news on RSpace, check out the RSpace section of this News Digest.
New Zenodo uploads
Two presentations were uploaded to Zenodo, both are from talks by Samantha Pearman-Kanza (so great humorous slides). One is on the topic of implementing electronic lab notebooks and the other on the role of Data Stewards as well as the network CaSDaR (Careers and Skills for Data-driven Research Network+).
Not all heroes wear capes! Data Stewards: The unsung heroes of the Research Data Lifecycle [Presentation]
Link to presentation on Zenodo with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.15586561
One does not simply implement an Electronic Lab Notebook: The epic saga of ELN implementation [Presentation]
Link to presentation on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15584743
Video demonstration: DMP Tool – RSpace – Dataverse integration
This short video demonstrates the workflow and integration of the data management plan tool DMP Tool with RSpace and Dataverse.
Video demonstration: Inventory import
In this short video demonstration (six videos) it is shown how to import samples, subsamples and containers into RSpace. The first video starts very simple, but it is getting more complex with each video. If you are using RSpace you should definitely check out these tutorials, I am sure you can learn something new.
That is it for today, thanks for reading. There was a lot going on last week. I hope you enjoyed it and see you next week.
Benjamin