Welcome to today’s News Digest, great things were published last week, and I am really excited to share them with you!

eLabFTW

eLabFTW is a free and open source electronic lab notebook developed by Deltablot.

Recording of Community Meeting IV

The recording of the fourth community meeting in November was published on YouTube, and I highly recommend watching this recording, and not just if you are interested in eLabFTW or electronic lab notebooks (ELNs). Why? Well, I think we agree that if we want to successfully promote FAIR data and better data management in general, we need to teach this in universities as early as possible. In this recording, Michael Krieger from FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg is reporting how they use eLabFTW in a physics lab course. I think this is a great example and maybe can motivate more people to establish ELNs in their lab courses:

The second part of the community meeting was also very interesting and shows in more detail how you can use the API in eLabFTW. A very useful and powerful tool to interact with the ELN.

FAIRmat

FAIRmat is the FAIR Data Infrastructure for Condensed-Matter Physics and the Chemical Physics of Solids, a consortium of the NFDI, the National Research Data Infrastructure in Germany.

Recording of tutorial on the use of pynxtools

In the past News Digests, we saw that new versions of the Python package pynxtools were published to Zenodo. Now, the recording of the FAIRmat tutorial 15 on the use of pynxtools was published on YouTube (here). It is a four video playlist, starting with a general introduction to FAIRmat and FAIR data management, information on the NeXus data model (used by pynxtools), the actual demonstration and hands-on with the Python package and the last video is on handling data in NOMAD. All FAIRmat tutorials are well organized and easy to follow. So, I highly recommend to just try it. You can find more information about the workshop here, including all resources used for the workshop.

Zenodo uploads

The list of new uploads to the Zenodo community of FAIRmat is quite long this week. There are the slides from the already mentioned FAIRmat tutorial 15, new versions of three plugins for NOMAD (NOMAD Schema Plugin Simulation Workflow, NOMAD Measurement Plugin and NOMAD Simulations Plugin) as well as posters and presentation from FAIR-DI European Conference on Data Intelligence 2024.

FAIRmat Tutorial 15: Use of pynxtools with Examples from Optical Spectroscopy
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14034440

FAIR Data Management for Computational Materials Science using NOMAD [Presentation FAIR-DI]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14184871

NOMAD Schema Plugin Simulation Workflow [Plugin]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14184788

NOMAD Measurements Plugin [Plugin]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14184382

NOMAD Simulations [Plugin]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14180532

Operating complex data analysis workflows in materials science online via a chatbot [Presentation FAIR-DI]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14170987

NOMAD CAMELS – Poster FAIR DI 2024 – A Configurable Application for Measurements, Experiments and Laboratory Systems [Poster FAIR-DI]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14066302

Standardization and FAIR data pipelines in X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy: a community-driven approach [Poster FAIR-DI]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14066003

Collecting & storing FAIR (meta-)data: An ARPES example [Presentation FAIR-DI]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14065847

Advancing Catalysis Research through Digitalization – The Role of NOMAD in Facilitating Data Management and Analysis [Presentation FAIR-DI]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14056267

LLMicroscopilot: An LLM assistant for scanning tunneling and transmission electron microscopy measurements [Poster FAIR-DI]
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14051590

NFDI4Chem

NFDI4Chem is the Chemistry consortium for the NFDI, the National Research Data Infrastructure in Germany.

DMP template for chemistry

Data management plans (DMPs) are useful tools to help plan and organize your research. Furthermore, it is getting more and more common that funders require some kind of DMP, checklist or something similar, where you, as a researcher, have to provide information about your plans on how to handle your research data, one example is the checklist by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). NFDI4Chem has now published a template for the Software RDMO (Research Data Management Organizer), which is based on this checklist by the DFG but added domain-relevant information, which makes it much easier to work with. If you are working in the field of chemistry, I highly recommend checking out this template. It can really help you with your next proposal. You can read more about the template as well as DMPs and RDMO on the website of the NFDI4Chem (here).

Recording of FAIR4Chem awardee Robin Lenz available

Each year, the NFDI4Chem awards the FAIR4Chem award (for more information on the award, click here). The FAIR4Chem award 2024 was awarded to Robin Lenz, and now the recording of the talk of Robin Lenz during the NFDI4Chem Stammtisch in May 2024 was uploaded to YouTube (see here). The whole presentation is worth watching, but I specially recommend checking out the second part of the talk, where Robin Lenz explains how data from different sources was handled and organised into one dataset:

Outro

Maybe you read today’s News Digests and are now motivated to establish an ELN into your lab courses, or you also want to harmonize your data (like Robin Lenz did), or want to start using tools like NOMAD and pynxtools, but you don’t really know where to start. This is what The FAIR Elephant is about, helping you to get the right start, and expert support. So don’t hesitate to contact me directly via thefairelephant@posteo.de, on BlueSky or LinkedIn. Let us make the most out of your data: Your data deserves it!

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