The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (The CCDC) and FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure (FIZ Karlsruhe) have announced the start of a joint development project that will deliver for the first time shared deposition and access services for crystallographic data across all domains of chemistry, including organic, inorganic and metal-organic structures. The resulting capability - to search over one million crystallographic structures and to deposit data for the CCDC's Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) and FIZ Karlsruhe's Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD) and their underlying CIF depots at a single source - will benefit researchers and educators across the chemistry disciplines.
Two of the chemistry domain's longest-established and most trusted data organisations are combining to deliver standardised and comprehensive access to every structure ever published, with all entries discoverable through links in publications and third party information sources. The development will be of particular interest to scientists whose research spans the boundaries between organic, inorganic and metal-organic chemistry, who will no longer need to be concerned about which database to address, clearing confusion about where the database borders lie.
The CCDC and FIZ Karlsruhe have operated under an informal agreement for the decades in which they have been in existence. The CSD is the world's repository of organic and metal-organic crystallographic data, containing all published structures in over 875,000 entries. The ICSD performs the same function for the inorganic chemistry community, featuring more than 185,000 structures. Each non-profit organisation respects the domain expertise of the other, and there is minimal overlap in the content of their databases. Recent advances in several areas of chemistry, such as research to design new batteries, gas storage systems, zeolites, catalysts, magnets, and fuel additives, have highlighted the challenges of researchers operating across these domains, who have had to operate across two independent data sources. The CCDC and FIZ Karlsruhe have now initiated a development project which will allow chemists to explore structures of interest simultaneously across both data sources, and for all crystallographers to deposit their data through a single, shared portal.
All of the existing expert data curation and publishing processes will remain in place, ensuring that users will still have access to the high quality data and advanced analysis capabilities on which they can depend. The new joint deposition and access portals will be built in Cambridge and based on the CCDC's recently-developed infrastructure for data deposition, processing, searching and sharing, all extended to meet the needs of the inorganic chemistry community.
Planning and development work on the collaboration has already begun. The first outputs will be released through the course of 2017 and will be accessible via www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk and www.fiz-karlsruhe.de. The CSD and ICSD will continue to develop and to be available independently from the CCDC and FIZ Karlsruhe, respectively.
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