We are currently seeing (and supporting !) the cultural change towards modern, digital research data management (RDM) in chemistry. An important set of criteria for good RDM are the FAIR guiding principles, aiming that research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

The FAIR4Chem Award 2022 celebrates published chemistry research datasets that best meet the FAIR principles and thus make a significant contribution to increasing transparency in research and the reuse of scientific knowledge. 

The contest was open for submission from 15.10. to 15.12.2021. The winners were selected in a two-stage process, using the criteria of the FAIR assessment tool developed by the Australian Research Data Commons infrastructure followed by a joint jury evaluation of the top-scoring submissions. 

The FAIR4Chem Award 2022 honors the datasets of:

Niels Krausch and Robert T. Giessmann: Collection of UV/Vis spectra acquired while monitoring reaction progress of thymidine phosphorolysis with varying reactant concentrations (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3243352)

and

Christopher Kessler et al.: Supplementary material for ‘Adsorption of Light Gases in Covalent Organic Frameworks: Comparison of Classical Density Functional Theory and Grand Canonical Monte Carlo Simulations’ (DOI: 10.18419/darus-1775)

Congratulations to the winners! The award included a prize money of 500€, kindly provided by the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie (FCI) and was presented during our NFDI4Chem session at the JCF Frühjahrssymposium on March 25th, 2022, in Hannover.

And remember: after the contest is before the contest! We will keep you posted on next years’ FAIR4Chem contest.

I am Steffen Neumann – head of the Research Group Bioinformatics and Scientific Data at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry in Halle (Saale). I have prior experience in the area of statistical mass spectrometry data analysis and metabolite identification. In this context, I continuously advocate open data and open standards, leading to community-wide e-infrastructures, and exploiting these for functional annotation through computational metabolomics analyses. I am a member of the scientific advisory board of the French metabolomics infrastructure MetaboHUB, and associate editor for BMC Bioinformatics, MDPI Metabolites, and Nature Scientific Data. 

Here in NFDI4Chem, I am co-lead with Chris Steinbeck in task area 4 on Metadata, Data Standards and Publication Standards. This is a truly vast and long term undertaking, and previous experience has shown that continuous persistence and perseverance are required to ensure progress.

I particularly enjoy coordinating the Lead-by-example efforts. Here, we work with the community (you!) to collect research data associated with recent or even upcoming manuscripts to gather, organise, and publish your data sets for and with you. Upcoming manuscripts will then have the benefit of being able to include a “Data availability statement” which points to citable data sets in a suitable resource, such as the Chemotion Repository or RADAR, depending on data types and content.

Did you know that MassBank data is now literally stored on ice for a thousand years?

At the beginning of February last year (precisely on 02.02.2020!) GitHub took a snapshot of all project repositories, put everything as QR code on durable film and deposited them into an old coal mine in Svalbard, Norway. Never heard of that place? It is also known as Spitzbergen, it was declared a demilitarised zone a hundred years ago, has permafrost, hosts the global seed vault and now also 21 terabytes of open source and open data. For a brief video (2:27 min) of that endeavour, head over to YouTube. 

MassBank EU, hosted at UFZ (Leipzig), is a public repository of mass spectral data for the scientific community. MassBank data are useful for the annotation of chemical compounds detected by mass spectrometry. The MassBank records are managed in the version control system called “git” on GitHub, with all spectral data and the corresponding meta data in a human-readable record format. Such version control systems have been used by programmers to organise the software source code already for decades, and increasingly they are also adopted for research data management. The collaboration between GitHub and Zenodo allows to archive MassBank releases on Zenodo with a Digital Object Identifier, e.g., . In the scope of the NFDI4Chem, we are working on simplifying the data submission and a better integration with the other NFDI4Chem services. 

P.S.: Other developments in NFDI4Chem which are available from GitHub, such as the Chemotion ELN, are of course preserved on ice as well!