With the cheminfo ELN FAIR data is not an afterthought of a data management plan (DMP).
Upon importation to the ELN all data are converted into standard, open formats like JCAMP-DX. All synthesis, analysis, and notes are can be exported with metadata to the Zenodo repository in a form that is amenable to data mining.
Data is “alive” all the time
You can interact with the data inside the ELN. You can pick peaks, analyze them, superimpose them, zoom into them. But you —or the readers of your paper— can also use the same functionalities after the deposition on Zenodo.
Free and open-source
All software developed for this ELN is free and open-source. This means that you can inspect in detail what is happening when converting file formats or analyzing your data —something that is often not possible with proprietary software.
Many research groups, both at EPFL and around the world, use the cheminfo ELN as part of their daily work. At EPFL, analytical services, such as the elemental analysis and mass spectra services, are tightly integrated with the ELN.
For the ELN, we have developed about 180 software packages which receive about 250’000 downloads per week, and have proven to be useful not just in the chemistry field. Browsers use one of our packages to perform speedtests, and our most popular package ml for machine-learning in the browser received more than two thousand stars on GitHub.
We maintain an open instance of the cheminfo ELN at c6h6.org, where you can log in using your GitHub account and start playing around. EPFL users visit eln.epfl.ch and log in with their GASPAR account.
If you like what you see, you are welcome to deploy your own ELN. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about deploying the ELN yourself.
The manager of the ELN instance decides where to store live data.
The EPFL system is configured as double master, with two master databases hosted in different buildings that are synchronized continuously.
Data can be exported nightly to the file system for backup purposes (e.g., sb1files.epfl.ch) so that you can leave anytime with all your data.
Users can download their data as a zip archive or publish it to the Zenodo repository in a couple of clicks (see example).