Blog CSD Communications

The CSD - The world’s essential database of crystal structures

After celebrating the huge milestone for structural chemistry with the addition of the millionth structure into the CSD in June 2019, the 2020.0 CSD Release now contains 1,034,174 entries and 1,016,168 unique structures. That means an increase of more than 60,000 entries, and we are well on our way to the next million!

Our fourth CSD Hero is Frank Fronczek, currently 7^th in our annual CSD author statistics. 

Frank Fronczek is Director of the X-ray Facility at Louisiana State University and a Fellow of the American Crystallographic Association.  He was a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley after receiving his PhD at Caltech, with Dick Marsh (trained by Linus Pauling) and Bill Schaefer.(1) 

We would like to thank Frank by highlighting some of his key contributions to the CSD.

In recent years, CSD Communications has grown to be one of the most popular methods for publishing structural data among the crystallographic community with more than 15,000 CSD Communications published in the last 5 years and 28,000 published overall since the 1980s. This represents a formidable amount of structural data which without CSD Communications may never have been made available to the scientific community. To promote the benefits which this wealth of crystallographic data can offer to the research community, the CCDC has therefore recently been working to make CSD Communications more convenient to publish, access and cite.

In recent years the world of scientific publishing has seen an increased interest in the data behind scientific articles and in publishing this data, sometimes without the article at all.  This can be seen in the rise of data journals and databases.  For many years the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) has offered a way to share crystal structure data without an associated scientific paper, so called CSD Communication (CSD Comms).  This allows authors to get credit for their work, which would gain them nothing sitting in a drawer or on a hard drive.  However, one of the most common concerns we hear about CSD Communications is regarding the quality of these structures that have not undergone peer-review and how we ensure the continued integrity of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).  With this in mind, we have used three methods to investigate potential differences in the data quality between structures from different journals and structures without traditional peer‑review.  We selected a range of high impact journals covering science, general chemistry and crystallography, as well as a data journal along with the CCDC’s own CSD Communications.

You may not realise it, but this is an exciting time for crystallographic data sharing and publishing! Inspired by the changes of recent years in research and scholarly communications, the scientific community is currently transforming how research data is stored, shared and published, with the objective of making all data more openly accessible. This is most definitely the case for crystallographic data, which here at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), we work to make freely accessible to the scientific community via our Access Structures service. In this blog, I will outline the new frameworks and initiatives shaping the future landscape of open scientific research data, which will no doubt influence how crystallographic data will be managed in the future.

You may not have yet heard about CSD Communications. Or you may have known them as they were previously recognized by the community: Private Communications. If you are one of our depositors we may have asked you if you would like your unpublished data to be included in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) as one. If you use the CSD for your research then you may have found the answers you were looking for by using a unique structure or refinement, shared with the community as a CSD Communication, that otherwise would have remained unpublished, confidential and unknown.