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Welcome

Dear Reader,

As always, the end of the year comes surprisingly quickly ;-)

In our last newsletter for you, however, we have a whole bundle of good news for you: from our successful meetings in autumn (Consortium Meeting 4.0, Editors4Chem, Ontologies4Chem, and BioHackathon) to great developments at InChI, Radar4Chem and Chemotion - and many more.
And we would like to draw special attention to our Community Workshop - save the date: 26.02.2024.

Enjoy the read and stay healthy!

Happy Holidays and a good start into the year 2024!

Report on the 4th Consortium Meeting

Members of NFDI4Chem met in Jena on November 22 and 23, 2023.

For the second time since the start of NFDI4Chem, all consortium and Advisory Board members, as well as partners of the consortium, had the chance to meet each other in person at our annual Consortium Meeting. This time, the meeting took place in Jena, the City of Light and hometown of the applicant institution Friedrich Schiller University.

Find a detailed report here.

Chemiedozententagung @RWTH Aachen University

The professors of the Department of Chemistry at RWTH Aachen University invite you to the Chemistry Lecturers' Conference 2024 in Aachen from 11 - 13 March 2024. The Chemistry Lecturers' Conference (CDT) is a symposium that brings together young academics from all areas of chemistry. Habilitation candidates and junior professors use this platform to present their research and exchange ideas. Moreover, workshops on publishing and grant writing as well as research data management are offered.

More Info and Registration (starts on 15th december 2023)

Highlights from the 2nd Ontologies4Chem Workshop

The 2nd Ontologies4Chem Workshop drew around 50 experts.

The Participants explored the evolving needs in ontology development and their application in annotating research data in chemistry. Key discussions delved into the complexities of curating chemical ontologies and highlighted the critical need for greater involvement from both domain and ontology experts.

NFDI4Chem, together with members of IUPAC CPCDS, organised the 2nd Editors4Chem Workshop.

This workshop is part of the holistic strategy of NFDI4Chem to increase the uptake of FAIR data publishing in chemistry by interfacing with the academic publishers. The importance of this topic to publishers was demonstrated by the fact that no fewer than 14 editors, representing 9 publishers active in chemistry, attended the three-hour workshop.

F-UJI score as indicator for the FAIRness of a dataset further increased

RADAR4Chem from FIZ Karlsruhe recently participated in the virtual support measure “FAIRness assessment challenge for datasets and semantic artefacts” of the EU project FAIR-IMPACT. As a result, the FAIRness of RADAR4Chem datasets was increased even further.

Two hackathons with NFDI4Chem participation took place during the last months.

The first one was the 2023 ELIXIR BioHackathon Europe. It was organised in hybrid form on the wonderful Campus Belloch near Barcelona and online. The next hackathon was the 2nd BioHackathon Germany #BHG2023, containing a project on Ontologies and Terminology services ecosystem.

The International Chemical Identifier (InChI) allows the identification of molecules for databases and is governed by IUPAC. The new version (1.07) is now available on GitHub enabling community contributions. At the same time, the code has been cleaned and is faster now. The next version (pending community review) will come out in 2024 enabling molecular inorganics.

ELN open for Non-Chemists

Updates from the Chemotion Repository. And a Milestone officially launched: LabIMotion offers customized functionalities.

The Chemotion Repository has undergone continuous improvement in recent months, introducing new features and implementing bug fixes.

LabIMotion ELN systematically extends the Chemotion ELN software in terms of functions and available modules. The extension makes it possible to use the ELN software either with or without chemistry functionality.

ELN ‘Herbie’ is available for testing now

The website https://demo.chemotion.scc.kit.edu/ provides a collection of test versions of various electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs). Now the ELN Herbie, developed at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, has been newly added. Herbie is aimed at the heterogeneous process chain of metallic biomaterials research.

Integration of Research Data Management into Chemistry Studies

Teaching RDM to students early on in their studies is key for a sustainable RDM integration in academia. Our approach at RWTH Aachen as an initial example was recently published in the Journal of Chemical Education. Find out more about our study at the NFDI4Chem-Homepage or directly visit the journal's homepage and read the full article there.

News from IUPAC

Gold Book updates:

The IUPAC Gold Book is a compendium of standard terminology for almost seven thousand concepts across the chemical sciences. Each term is referenced with a unique DOI and programmatic access is available via a REST API, https://goldbook.iupac.org/pages/api. The reuse license has recently been updated to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International for individual terms. Over ten thousand additional terms are in the pipeline for a major release scheduled in mid-2024. IUPAC is collaborating with the NFDI4Chem Terminology Service to provide guidelines for referencing Gold Book term definitions as a canonical source for chemical ontologies.

WorldFAIR Chemistry update:

A new report is available from the IUPAC WorldFAIR Chemistry project, “D3.3 Utility services for Chemistry Standards” (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10289785). The report describes a programmatic interface for services that address a substantial barrier to chemical information exchange in the lack of standardized system-to-system interoperability of chemical representations. A standard communications protocol would enable any data resource that indexes chemicals to register as part of a global search service to programmatically Find and Access data related to a particular chemical and assess the Interoperability and Reusability of the chemical representations used. IUPAC is interested in broad community participation to further develop the API service, facilitate navigation and interoperability across domains and use cases, and increase the adoption of InChI and other machine-readable chemical representations. A prototype and interactive demo with live code and visualizations are available at: bit.ly/ProtServices

NFDI4Chem @ Conferences

During 2023, the NFDI4Chem team went to many conferences to present NFDI4Chem with booths, talks, and posters. As always, our Conference Train page provides an overview, while we are already preparing for the upcoming conference seasons in 2024. Visit and talk to us!

Upcoming Events

Community Workshop 2024

We would like to invite all members of NFDI4Chem as well as interested researchers beyond the consortium to our second Community Workshop “The Future of Research Data Management in Chemistry” on 26th February 2024 in Mainz. This workshop aims to discuss hot topics in chemistry and research data management, identify blind spots of the past endeavors, and determine key aspects of the future work of NFDI4Chem. This will also be a partnering event to prepare proposals in and beyond NFDI4Chem.

The workshop addresses researchers with previous activities and engagements in digital research data or other data-related topics in chemistry. More detailed information and registration is available on our website.

Consortium Meeting 4.5 in April 2024

We are happy to announce that the next Consortium Meeting is already scheduled: all members, advisory boards and cooperation partners will meet again in our spring online meeting on 10th April 2024. Register now or save the date!

Research Data Management Workshop for Chemists in Hannover

Good Research Data Management (RDM) is essential to ensure that your research data is FAIR (Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable). In this two-day course (17.-18.01.) we will take you through the basics of RDM while applying these to a chemistry context.

A hybrid solution is not possible. If you have any questions, please contact our helpdesk via helpdesk@nfdi4chem.de and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Chemotion/NFDI4Chem "Stammtisch"

We are looking back on another successful year at the NFDI4Chem Stammtisch. During the last three years, the Stammtisch advanced to a format that people like to come back to. Visit our website to watch most of the 30 presentations recorded during our get-togethers.

The new season in 2024 will be opened by a well-known guest in our Stammtisch.

Upcoming presentations:

January 26:

Dr. Mark Doerr will talk about: How open Semantic Web Technologies, open data formats and automation will help the Chemist to focus on science – a glimpse on LARA and SciDat