Improving our author services and encouraging as many researchers as possible to embrace open science is one of our key objectives. We know we cannot achieve this alone and are collaborating with groups, tools and organizations who already support academics in their work.
Chemists from industry and academia that rely on crystal structure information deposit and query data from the CCDC, who compile and curate the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) — a database of over one million organic and metal-organic structures. As the chemistry community’s first port of call for crystal structure information, in 2017 we updated our guidelines to strongly encourage our authors to share their data through the CCDC to maximize the transparency and reuse of their findings.
We are now working to speed up the process by which crystal structures are made available from CCDC following publication of the accompanying research article and ensure that bidirectional linking exists between the research and the data. All CCDC numbers included within the Data Availability Statement will be tagged by our production team and a feed sent directly to the CCDC. Upon receipt, the CCDC will immediately end any data embargo for the dataset, make the structure freely available and link it back to the Hindawi article. This will improve visibility and connectivity, and enable researchers interested in the structure to access the open access article on the Hindawi website, promoting reuse or the research and citation of the article.
With these benefits now live, we hope that authors, researchers and industry professionals who use the CCDC’s extensive database, will recognize the benefit of the accelerated connection between research and data which, when coupled with open access publication of their article ensures they get the most out of their valuable research.
This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). The illustration is by Hindawi and is also CC-BY.