Almost five years after its launch in October 2020, the NFDI4Chem consortium continues its mission to establish a sustainable data infrastructure for chemistry and promote digital workflows and FAIR data practices. This year’s virtual Consortium Meeting 5.5 brought together nearly 70 participants to reflect on milestones and success stories across six Task Areas—ranging from governance and community engagement to smart lab tools, repositories, and standards.
Success Stories
A key success factor is the consortium’s effective governance, with regular meetings of the steering committee, project management, and Task Areas enabling fast decisions and strong collaboration. Community engagement remains a cornerstone, with nearly 80 RDM and ELN workshops reaching over 1,300 participants. New formats such as train-the-trainer and trainerless models are underway. Integration of RDM and ELNs into university curricula supports the cultural change and is currently supported at six universities. Individual assistance is available through the Helpdesk and the well-curated Knowledge Base. The annual FAIR4Chem Award promotes FAIR data publication.
Among the smart lab highlights were a full RDM workflow for Cyclic Voltammetry within the Chemotion ELN and the adaptation of the LabIMotion extension, co-developed with researchers in electrochemistry. Data can be deposited in the NFDI4Chem repository federation, which are connected via the Search Service and now encompass ~140,000 searchable datasets. The inclusion of these repositories in author guidelines of over 30 journals reflects their recognized quality.
The meeting also showcased international collaborations on metadata standards, including progress on InChI, MIChI, converter tools, chemistry ontologies, and integration into the European Open Science Cloud. Legal frameworks and unified authentication (IAM4NFDI) were discussed in closing.
After the public consortium meeting, the members of the consortium according to the NFDI statutes came together for updates from the NFDI e.V. They elected Oliver Koepler as spokesperson and Chistoph Steinbeck as co-spokesperson to represent NFDI4Chem in the consortial assembly. Congratulations!
The next in-person Consortium Meeting (6.0) is scheduled for 10–11 September 2025 in Mainz.
