Network

Chemistry is a core natural science influencing and supporting many other research areas such as medicine and health, biology, materials science, engineering, or energy. The long-term preservation and re-use of research data from chemistry therefore also fertilises other disciplines. NFDI4Chem focuses on molecules and their characterisation data. This circumstance is reflected in the extensive interconnection of NFDI4Chem with other consortia that have chemical ties and work with chemical data.

Depiction of cross-consortial collaborations, based on ‘Collaborative work in NFDI’ (10.5281/zenodo.8296725). Line thickness and dot size correlate with number of collaborations. Created by W. Zinke & É. Demandt, Aug. 2023.

Besides the chemistry centered view on molecule data, we identified further, more generic cross-cutting topics of importance in the NFDI as a whole. These cross-cutting topcs are described in the Berlin Declaration, co-authored by the NFDI4Chem leadership and signed by 21 NFDI consortia.

The community-wide negotiation of data and metadata standards in chemistry require global efforts in cooperation with international bodies for standardisation in chemistry and beyond and cannot be achieved on a national level. Therefore, NFDI4Chem will initiate international community processes to establish minimum information (MI) standards for data and machine-readable metadata as well as open data standards in key areas of chemistry.

Key personnell of NFDI4Chem are active in a number of international bodies and efforts, such as International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) GO FAIR Chemistry Implementation Network (ChIN) , Chemistry Research Data Interest Group, ELIXIR implementation networks, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and more, which promote FAIR data in both the chemical as well as biomedical domain. We will aim to harmonize those existing efforts with FAIR data aspects across the whole of NFDI and engage in international networking with generic and specialized bodies promoting RDM and standards.