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. Let us dive right in.

DAPHNE4NFDI

X-ray and neutron diffraction refinement with AIXtal

This is important news for all people working with X-ray and neutron diffraction data. AIXtal is a new user-friendly platform, still in development, for X-ray and neutron diffraction data refinement. You can learn more about it from a poster by Noah Nachtigall et al..

Link to the poster in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20610894

Connecting data repositories

The following presentation is flag for all people interested in linking data between repositories and of to connect different NFDI tools. This is not discipline-specific to natural science but still very important and hopefully interesting for many people reading this News Digest. Check out the presentation by Nenad Krdzavac and Felix Engel.

Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20083530

FAIRmat

The process of standardization is very long and can be difficult. Lukas Pielstickers shows in a presentation how FAIRmat tackled this problem and shows the advantage of extending an already known and accepted standards, here NeXus, in comparison to starting from scratch and creating an entirely new standard.

Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20661867

NFDI4Chem

Legal aspects in publishing chemistry data

If you are providing workshops on the topic of research data management, then the following recording of a talk by Thomas Hartmann is a must-watch. It is dealing with the question of legal aspects when publishing data, and goes into details why chemistry data can be public domain and how the Good Research Practice can actually be more important than the creative commons licences when discussing these topics. Highly recommend and worth integrating into your workshops.

The AI revolution in cheminformatics

On the occasion of the 50. NFDI4Chem Stammtisch Christoph Steinbeck took the opportunity and to celebrate and discuss deep learning and Open Data in molecular informatics. If you are interested in the field of AI and want to see some examples where AI was already successfully integrated into cheminformatics, then have a look at this talk.

Two standards combined: IUPAC and CHMO

Good news for all the people interested in controlled vocabularies: The IUPAC Gold Book definitions are now integrated in CHMO, the Chemical Methods Ontology. This is also a great example to add to your workshop materials on standards, showing how these can be combined and play together. Read more about it on the NFDI4Chem webpage in an article by Philip Strömert.

Link to the article on the NFDI4Chem webpage

NFDI4Earth

Report of annual NFDI4Earth meeting: A resource collection

In May, the annual meeting of NFDI4Earth took place, and you can find a report on the NFDI4Earth webpage. This report discusses the meeting itself and provides very useful links to projects within NFDI4Earth. For example, the NFDI4Earth label, which helps researchers to find suitable repositories for their data. Furthermore, you will find three keynotes linked: The first one by Barbara Ebert about shaping the NFDI there you will also find an outlook on NFDI beyond 2028. Second, a presentation by Alessandro Rizzo discussing the way from a national research infrastructure (here the French Research Infrastructure for Earth System and Environmental Science) to a thematic European Open Science Cloud Node. A thirdly, Juha Oksanen providing insights on the development of Geoportti Research Infrastructure in Finland. Well worth the read, I in my opinion.

Link to the article on the NFDI4Earth webpage

In addition, multiple posters from the meeting were uploaded to the Zenodo community of NFDI4Earth, see the list below:

Poster on the Biomass Atlas by Fabian Sittaro et al., DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20542001
Poster on the Visual Question-Answering for Thematic Maps data set by Eftychia Koukouraki et al., DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20560252
Poster on Incorporating FAIR and Open Data Practices in Academic Rewarding Systems by Andreas Hübner and Daniel Nüst, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20590303
Poster on High-Value Data in Practice: Why Availability is Not Enough by Astrid Ziemann et al., DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20544072

Furthermore, there is a general presentation on NFDI4Earth including available services & tools, recent developments, education & training overviews and an outlook on NFDI4Earth in the future.

Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20590617

Outro

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

Benjamin

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