Developing a RDM Beginner's Guideline for Students in Chemistry and Catalysis

An organized research data management is a basic requirement for all research in all fields. In chemistry and catalysis, students will need to manage their research data of reactions, analysis data and more beginning from their first practical courses and their first reaction protocols up to their respective Bachelor and Master thesis. At the same time, research data management is not present in the curriculum in most Germany universities in chemistry, and additional courses are often aimed at PhD students and PostDocs, leaving students up to themselves to organize and handle their data. To tackle this problem, the Task Area 5 of NFDI4Cat (Outreach and Training) is developing a beginner's guideline for students in chemistry and catalysis. The aim of this guideline is to provide a concise source of important RDM aspects, like the life cycle of data, FAIR data or archiving of data, together with hands-on examples of aspects of data management, like raw Vs. processed data on chemistry-typical datasets like NMRs or performance data of catalysts. Additionally, the guideline will also provide insights into electronical lab notebooks as modern RDM tools, with examples taken from the latest advancements of the working group of Prof. Udo Kragl with elabFTW for individual experiment entries and group-wide equipment management. Finally, aspects of publication and Open Access will also be discussed. All with the target group of pre-PhD students in mind. Specifically, the current draft of the guideline is aiming to tackle the following main topics: RDM and the life cycle of data Analogue Vs. digital RDM Examples of digital RDM for students and working groups, including ELNs Publication of data and Open Access Data archiving, repositories and FAIR data.