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.

FAIRMat

Explaining FAIR with bricks

A presentation by Lukas Pielsticker about research data management and open science was uploaded to the Zenodo Community of FAIRmat. The presentation starts with a brief introduction to the NFDI and FAIRmat and then explains more detail the data life cycle as well as the FAIR principles (with the help of bricks) and an introduction to NOMAD as well as NOMAD Oasis. So if you are looking for some inspiration for your workshops regarding research data management, specially if you are not familiar with the example of using bricks, to explain the FAIR principles, definitely have a look.

Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20041832

NOMAD as an ELN: make it your own

A more in-depth description on how to use NOMAD as an electronic lab notebook and how to host your own NOMAD Oasis is shown in a presentation by Hampus Näsström. The slides provide some great examples as well as an overall understanding of NOMAD and the NOMAD universe. If you never had the time to check it out, or are new to NOMAD it is worth your time.

Link to the presentation in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20067073

NFDI4Cat

Voc4Cat, Repo4Cat, PID4Cat and more: An NFDI4Cat overview

A short and informative read about the goals and tools of NFDI4Cat was published by David Linke in the Bunsen Magazin. So if you need a short update of the latest developments or want to forward a short summary of the works of NFDI4Cat to your catalysis researchers, then check out the article. You can find out more about it on the webpage of NFDI4Cat.

Link to the article on the NFDI4Cat webpage

NFDI4Chem

Digital skills in chemistry curriculum projects funded

The Fonds der Chemischen Industrie (FCI) has funded projects to improve and include data science in the chemistry curriculum. Six partners of NFDI4Chem are involved in some of the funded projects, and you can read more about the funding as well as the funded universities in an article by Theo Bender on the NFDI4Chem webpage. If you are working in RDM support in one of the universities and have not heard about the project, maybe also a good time to contact them, perhaps you can support them and benefit from each other.

Link to the article on the NFDI4Chem webpage

NFDI4Earth

Easy access to data hidden in spatial data infrastructures

How can it be made easier to find data in spatial data infrastructures? James Ondieki, Matthes Rieke and Simon Jirka show in a poster how an intelligent integration of AI can to make data more accessible. A small spoiler, it is not as simple a just using an LLM and everything is fixed. Check out the poster in the Zenodo community of NFDI4Earth.

Link to the poster in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20540882

Award-winning citizen science project: Colouring Dresden

The next project is something that I will include in one of my next more general research data management workshops. It is the project “Colouring Dresden”. It is a citizen science platform of building data, and by the way, won the second place in the SaxFDM Open Data Award in 2024. You can see an overview of the project in a poster by Theodor Rieche et al. on Zenodo. It is a great example of open data and colourful, which is great for workshop examples.

Link the poster in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20529146

Outro

That’s 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.