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. This is the last News Digest of 2025, and I want to take this opportunity to thank you for joining me on the journey of news and updates throughout the year. So let us dive right in.

FAIRmat

Documentation of NeXus-FAIRmat proposal

NeXus is a well-known and common data format for neutron, x-ray and muon science. With the NeXus-FAIRmat proposal, FAIRmat aimed to include cases from their community (materials science) like electron microscopy (EM), photo-emission spectroscopy, ellipsometry, atom probe tomography and field-ion microscopy and they were successful. In November, the latest version of the NeXus format was published (v2025.11) including the formats from the NeXus-FAIRmat proposal. Now FAIRmat published excerpts from the discussiong during the process to Zenodo. So in case you are intretesed in how FAIRmat acomplished to include their work into the NeXus format, check out this collection. I included some links to the proposal as well as NeXus incase you want to learn more.

Link to the excerpts in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17986964
Link to the website of the FAIRmat-NeXus Proposal
Link to the website of the NeXus data format

Services of PSDI

In the past year, PSDI reworked their website to offer a better overview of their services, as well as an easier entry point to the services. Now they started to provide more detailed information about the services in short videos which are available on their YouTube Channel. The first services that are introduced are the Biomolecular Simulations Database, the Cross Data Search Service and the Data Conversion Service. If you are working in chemistry, or you are providing trainings and workshops in the field, then you should definitely check out these videos and share them with your colleagues and researchers. The playlist on YouTube is called PSDI Website, which I will link below, but you can also find the three videos directly here.

Link to the PSDI Website playlist on YouTube

Software updates

NFDI4Cat

nfdi4cat/voc4cat-tool: v1.0.0rc2
Link to release notes on GitHub
Link to software in Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18025408

Outro

That’s it for today and for 2025. Thank you so much for reading these weekly overviews and providing me with feedback, which helps me to improve week-by-week. I am very excited to see what will come in 2026. What do you think will be the biggest topic in RDM in natural science in 2026?

Thanks for reading, enjoy the New Year’s celebrations, all the best for the year ahead and see you in the next post.
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 me coffee. Your support is much appreciated.