This national survey serves as a starting point for all upcoming efforts in research data management in chemistry.
Research data management is an important task to make research sustainable and comprehensible for other researchers. In our first community survey we asked chemists in Germany about their experience in data management, from the beginning of data production to the publication and reuse of research data. A detailed evaluation of the survey was published in the journal “Zeitschrift für anorganische und allgemeine Chemie” (open access). A short summary can be found hot off the press in the “Nachrichten aus der Chemie” (open access).
The most important results are:
1) Less than a fifth of chemists use electronic laboratory notebooks.
2) When researchers still record their data manually but save the data digitally, this is often due to missing tools;´.
3) Linking of research data with metadata, like methods or information about the sample, ensures the reproducibility of the results.
4) Chemists are open to share their research data with other scientists or to reuse research data from foreign researchers.
