CCDC and Open Research Europe Partner to Help Accelerate the Availability and Accessibility of Structural Data
The Partnership Further Demonstrates both Organizations Commitment to Ensure Crystal Structure Data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)
Open Research Europe authors can now choose the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) as their repository of choice during the submission process.
Open Research Europe is the European Commission’s multi-disciplinary open-access publishing platform, where Horizon Europe, Horizon 2020, Euratom, European Research Council, COST Actions, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions grantees can publish their work with no author-facing fees.
This partnership between Open Research Europe and the CCDC is another major step for the open research publishing venue, following indexing in Scopus, PubMed, and others since its launch in 2021, and a major milestone for European Commission-funded chemical sciences researchers.
Chemists from both industry and academia rely on crystal structure data from the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, which compiles and curates the CSD — the database that houses over 1.25 million 3D organic and metal-organic experimental crystal structures.
As part of this indexing partnership, Open Research Europe authors can choose the CSD as their repository of choice during the submission process to fulfil the Open Research Europe open data policy.
The Open Research Europe team will work to ensure crystal structure data is made available in the CSD following the publication of the accompanying research article and ensure that reciprocal linking exists between the research article and the structural data in the CSD.
Any articles published with relevant crystallographic data will be identified and CCDC will be notified of the publication details at the point of publication. CCDC will then make the corresponding dataset freely available on the joint CCDC and FIZ Karlsruhe Access Structures service and link back to the Open Research Europe article. Organic and metal-organic structures will also be curated and added to the CSD by CCDC scientists and inorganic data will be passed to FIZ Karlsruhe for curation into the ICSD (Inorganic Crystal Structure Database). Ensuring the deposited datasets are publicly available and added to the appropriate repository will increase the discoverability of the dataset as well as knowledge from the structural data.
This will improve research visibility and connectivity, and enable researchers interested in crystal structure data to freely access the article on the Open Research Europe platform, promoting research reuse and greater opportunities for article citations.
Continued efforts to collaborate with subject-specific indexers and repositories are key to making the data deposition process more streamlined for authors, whilst ensuring their associated data is freely accessible once their article is published on the Open Research Europe platform.
Establishing a workflow between Open Research Europe and the CCDC also helps authors to abide by FAIR data principles, a governing factor of the Open Research Europe data policy – ensuring crystal structure data is as findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) as possible.
Open Research Europe aligns with the policies and requirements of the current European Commission’s research framework program on depositing research-related data and materials. An important principle of the Open Research Europe platform is to aid with the discoverability of research published by its authors and to continually strive to address the needs of the research community.
View the Open Research Europe website to learn more about publishing with Open Research Europe. If you have any questions about Open Research Europe, or suggestions of other indexes you’d like to see Open Research Europe indexed in, email the team at info@open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu.
Next Steps
To discuss how the collective insights from the 1.25M+ crystal structures in the CSD can benefit your research and/or request a demo of the CSD and software with one of our scientists, please contact us via this form or using this email address.
View case studies where the CSD has aided scientific research into pharmaceuticals, functional materials and more.