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. I am just back from a two-week holiday (hiking in southern Germany), which means today we will not only have a look at the last week, but the last two weeks. Usually, I watch all the videos I link in this News Digest, but since there were so many uploads, and I took my holidays serious, this was not feasible this time. So you will find some videos with less context. Now that you know the circumstances, let us drive right in.

NFDI4Chem

Fighting fake data and disinformation

This recording of Bernhard Sabel on scientific publishing and the threads of disinformation and fake data I actually had the pleasure of watching live before I went on holiday, and I recommend watching it. Not for a specific user group, it is not chemistry-specific. Just take the time and watch it.

Second community-survey results published

In 2024 NFDI4Chem did their second community survey and the results are now published in an article in Digital Discovery by Jochen Ortmeyer et al.. The survey has a similar design to the one NFDI4Chem did in 2019 which allows a comparison. This is again something I need to check out in more detail in the coming week, so I unfortunately cannot provide you with more insights right now, but take a look yourself.

Link to the article about survey results on the NFDI4Chem webpage

NFDI4Earth

The academic rewarding system and FAIR data

In a recently uploaded report to Zenodo by Andreas Hübner and Daniel Nüst have a closer look at the academic rewarding system and which role FAIR as well as Open data plays and have a look at the relevance for the earth system sciences. They show how researchers, member of academic societies, journal editors and grant reviewers can support the cultural shift need and discussing responsible research assessment (DORA, Leiden Manifest, CoARA).

Link to the report in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20158665

Digital Time Series Infrastructure for Environmental Observations

In a poster, Marc Hanisch et al. are introducing an ecosystem for sensor-based environmental data, check out the poster and learn more about the platform and the modular architecture.

Link to the poster in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20287408

PSDI

AI-driven materials

PSDI started a new webinar series with the goal to present the projects of a funding call in 2025. The first session was focused on AI-driven materials discovery. I haven’t had the opportunity to check it out myself, but have a look and let me know in the comment what your highlight of the talks by James Kermode and Peter McCallum and Susana Garcia are. More information about the webinar series as well as the link to the slide in Zenodo can be found on the webpage of PSDI.

Link to the article on the PSDI webpage

Discussions on electronic lab notebooks

PSDI organized a discussion event regarding electronic lab/research notebooks. The recordings of the presentations are now available at YouTube. I am looking forward to check out these recordings myself, and I am specially interested in the talk by Cerys Willoughby about pitfalls of templates for electronic lab notebooks, but I am pretty sure all the talks provide some new insights. James Bird explains how to select an ELN for 10,000 users, Nick Lynch provides insights on ELNs in academic and biotechs/pharma context, James Wilson shows how RSpace was introduced and is used and much, much more. The introduction to the meeting was done by Samantha Pearman-Kanza by discussing barriers of ELN implementations and how to overcome them.

Link to the playlist on the PSDI YouTube channel
Link to more information about the event at the PSDI webpage

For researchers from the UK: PSDS is becoming part of PSDI

The Physical Sciences Data Service (PSDS) is becoming part of the PSDI. This is relevant for researchers from the UK and good-to-know for everybody else. PSDS provides access to licensed databases in the fields of crystallography, thermodynamics and more. If you would like to know more about it, check out the article at the PSDI webpage.

Link to the article at the PSDI webpage

PUNCH4NFDI

Education and training with real data: EXPLORE

EXPLORE is an analysis platform for education and training by PUNCH4NFDI that allows simple access to ATLAS Open Data. Check out the presentation by Baida Achkar et al. and learn more how it works and how you can access and use EXPLORE yourself. Share the word with your physics communities and let them know of this fantastic possibility.

Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20407459

Outro

That’s it for today. Two weeks full of new things. Next week the News Digest will be back in the usual way with more insights to each of the publications. 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.