Minimum Information Standards Workshops

Minimum Information Standards are a critical requirement in the different fields of science, including Chemistry, to face the reproducibility crisis and enhance the FAIRness of (meta)data. NFDI4Chem has taken the responsibility to contribute to the development of Chemistry Minimum Information standards with other standardization parties, such as IUPAC. We opted to name such standards as “MIChI”s, which stands for Minimum Information about a Chemical Investigation.

We follow a development roadmap starting by exhaustive reviewing of metadata availability/requesting in standards, repositories, supplementary materials in journals, file formats and corresponding software, and even ontologies, which helps us drafting our MIChIs and deciding how strict they should be. In addition to FAIRness, machine-readability is a key aspect in that process.

To ensure acceptance of the MIChIs, NFDI4Chem organizes international workshops in different disciplines of chemistry, involving chemists, ontologists, device vendors, publishers and infrastructure developers, where the MIChI drafts are discussed and enhanced.

NFDI4Chem has provided a dedicated website to cover the workshops and publish their outcomes along with the MIChIs. The corresponding GitHub repository is where users can submit issues about the MIChI, which are considered in the later versions.