The folks at DataCite have announced a new research object discovery service which aims to give users a “ comprehensive overview of connections between entities in the research landscape” . The portal https://commons.datacite.org acts as the entry point for three basic types of persistent identifiers (PIDs); Research works, using the DOI (digital object identifier) as a PID.

In the previous post, I introduced three of a new generation of search engines specialising in the discovery of data. Data has some special features which make its properties slightly different from the conceptual (or natural language) searches we are used to performing for general information and so a search engine specifically for data is invariably going to reflect this.

Chemists have long been familiar with search engines that aspire to index a large proportion of the chemical literature.

A PID or persistent identifier has been in common use in scientific publishing for around 20 years now. It was introduced as a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), and the digital object in this case was the journal article. From 2000 onwards, DOIs started appearing for most journal articles, journals having obtained them from a registration agency, CrossRef.

In the pipeline reports on an intriguing new ring system acting as an isostere for morpholine. I was interested in how the conformation of this ring system might be rationalised electronically and so I delved into the article.[cite]10.1021/acs.jmedchem.9b00348[/cite] Here I recount what I found.

I have had some interesting discussions recently regarding metadata. What emerges is that it can be quite a broadly defined concept and it is clear that a variety of answers might be obtained when asking the simple question “what is it useful for?” Here I set out some of my answers to that question. Metadata vs Data.

In a previous post, I looked at the Findability of FAIR data in common chemistry journals. Here I move on to the next letter, the A = Accessible. The attributes of A[cite]10.1038/sdata.2016.18[/cite] include: (meta)data are retrievable by their identifier using a standardized communication protocol. the protocol is open, free and universally implementable.  the protocol allows for an authentication and authorization procedure.

In recent years, findable data has become ever more important (the F in FAIR). Here I test that F using the DataCite search service. Firstly an introduction to this service. This is a metadata database about datasets and other research objects.

The conventional procedures for reporting analysis or new results in science is to compose an “article”, augment that perhaps with “supporting information” or “SI”, submit to a journal which undertakes peer review, with revision as necessary for acceptance and finally publication. If errors in the original are later identified, a separate corrigendum can be submitted to the same journal, although this is relatively rare.

Members of the chemical FAIR data community have just met in Orlando (with help from the NSF, the American National Science Foundation) to discuss how such data is progressing in chemistry. There are a lot of themes converging at the moment.