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!
