The FAIRmat team participated in a variety of ways at the DPG-Frühjahrstagung 2023 (DPG Spring Meeting) of the Condensed Matter Section (SKM) in Dresden and had a great time talking to the condensed-matter community about FAIR data management!

FAIRmat organized the special plenary talk discussion “NFDI and FAIR research data: benefit or burden?” with the panel members comprising Michael Mößle (DFG), Claudia Draxl (FAIRmat, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Ralph Claessen (Universität Würzburg) and Frank Schreiber (DAPHNE4NFDI, Universität Tübingen). Michael Mößle (DFG) started the discussion by stressing the need to better use scientific data and outcomes of DFG funded projects, and the fact that developing the standards and best practices for FAIR data management should be driven by the community for each discipline, due to different requirements of each field. The topics discussed included the implications of FAIR data management on the community, the need to provide a protective space for scientists to work with their data, and standards to control electronic lab note books (ELNs) usage and training. 

The discussion was then open to the audience, which was lively, and we saw that our community are interested in FAIR data issues and are thinking about how to overcome the hurdles associated with FAIR research data management.

In the focus session Making Experimental Data F.A.I.R. – New Concepts for Research Data Management a variety of speakers including several members of our team spoke about their experiences implementing FAIR research data management practices such as exper

imental data and meta data generation workflows, meta data schemas and file formats, electronic lab notebooks, novel tools for handling and analyzing scientific research data

Finally, our team were at the FAIRmat and DAPHNE4NFDI booth to meet the community, inform people about FAIR data management, and chat with them about our work. Whether people were learning about FAIR data for the first time or coming to us as seasoned experts, the conversations were engaging and we had a great time meeting everyone!

If you missed the chance to see our talks or meet us at the booth, you can

• Check out past talks about our work on YouTube.
• Read our brochure on data management plans here on our website.
• Reach out to us any time at fairmat@physik.hu-berlin.de.

We are excited to announce our upcoming FAIRmat tutorial on extending NOMAD and NOMAD Oasis.

NOMAD is a research data management platform for materials science. NOMAD Oasis allows you to operate the popular NOMAD service for your own lab, with your rules, and on your resources. You can adopt NOMAD Oasis to implement your institutes data policies and to work with your specific data types and workflows.

This tutorial aims to introduce participants to the new plugin mechanism in NOMAD and teach them how to develop and integrate their own Python schemas and parsers to a NOMAD Oasis. Plugins enable you to alter how NOMAD processes data and therefore allow for more powerful customisations than the custom schemas presented in past tutorials. Participants will learn how to enable the conversion of new materials science data formats into NOMAD's standardised and machine-readable format. NOMAD plugins can be contributed to the community to further promote reproducibility and transparency in materials science.

The FAIRmat guide to writing a Data Management Plan (DMP) is now available on our materials page.

This quick guide outlines what a DMP is, why it is important and how to approach writing one. It includes guidelines from the DFG but the advice is relevant to any researcher writing or contributing to a DMP.

The brand new NOMAD website has been launched! The new website features a modern and sleek design that is easy to navigate and provides a comprehensive overview of NOMAD's unique features and benefits. We have also incorporated new sections that showcase the solutions we offer, the latest infrastructure updates, our tutorials and the various channels available for user support. 

Whether you are a frequent NOMAD user or just learning about it for the first time, the new webpage will provide you with all the information you need to get started and make the most of NOMAD.

Visit the new webpage at https://nomad-lab.eu/.

On March 15, our FAIRmat hands-on tutorial series continues with a tutorial on Using NOMAD as an Electronic lab notebook (ELN) for FAIR data.

Approaching the era of big data-driven materials science, one crucial step to collecting, describing, and sharing experimental data is the adoption of electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN). At present, most synthesis data are not structured comprehensively , but FAIRmat is offering a solution by developing and operating the open-source software NOMAD. 

In this tutorial, we demonstrate the usage of NOMAD as an ELN which enables the users to generate data following the FAIR principles. We will show how we adopted NOMAD to capture data from synthesis and experiment and make use of an automated data workflow. 

FAIRmat is delighted to welcome Dr. Laurenz Rettig as the leader of Task B2: Angle-resolved Photoemission

Dr. Rettig is the leader of the Dynamics of Correlated Materials group at the Fritz Haber Insitute of the Max Planck Society.

We are happy to welcome Prof. Dr. Hongbin Zhang as the newest leader of Task E4: Magnetism and Spintronics. 

Prof. Dr. Zhang leads the Theory of Magnetic Materials Group at the Department of Materials and Geosciences, TU Darmstadt.

The Physik Journal article "Früh zur Datenkompetenz", coauthored by Michael Krieger (Area D) and Heiko Weber (Areas B&D) is now publicly available online! This article discusses the authors' experiences teaching data management skills to undergraduate students, and the importance of learning about data management and good scientific practice early in one's physics career.

We are looking for a Training and Documentation Expert for Research Data Management in Materials Science to join the FAIRmat team! 

In this role you will...

• be responsible for developing training and documentation materials for both researchers and trainers.
• establish a web-based platform containing these materials (videos, online courses, exercises, documentation, etc.). This platform will train users how to implement research data management with FAIRmat’s data infrastructure NOMAD.
• work at the interface between the infrastructure developers and the outreach team.
• present the materials at research institutions, workshops, and international conferences.

There will also be the possibility to pursue a doctorate in the field of physics (didactics). 

The full job description and instructions on how to apply are available here.

On February 15, our FAIRmat hands-on tutorial series continues with a tutorial on Molecular Dynamics Trajectories and Workflows in NOMAD.

The FAIRmat team has recently extended the NOMAD infrastructure to support trajectories and workflows, including classical molecular dynamics simulations. This interactive tutorial will walk users through the new features, demonstrating how to upload data, assess the system composition and equilibration, explore the trajectory metadata, and extract archive entries to perform detailed analyses.