Blog March 2019

This year the CCDC decided to participate in the Cambridge Science Festival. The Cambridge Science Festival is two weeks of organised science outreach events available to the general public.  This year marks the 25^th anniversary of the festival; that’s 25 years of providing the public with the opportunity to explore and discuss science as well as inspiring young people to consider a career in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering or maths).  The programme included debates, talks, exhibitions, workshops, interactive activities, films, comedy and performance, all held in lecture theatres, museums, cafes and galleries around Cambridge.^[1]

Data integrity investigations at the CCDC 

The integrity of the data within the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is of great importance to the CCDC and, no doubt, to the many scientists across the world that use the CSD as part of their research. The CSD is a trusted repository of crystallographic data and as such we are taking a pro-active approach to ensuring the data that we store is both trustworthy and consistent, enabling scientists to find and utilise the best data for their research. Our overall aim is to be able to help depositors, peer reviewers and wider users of the CSD identify the quality and integrity of the data and to ensure, as far as possible, that there are no cases of fraud or plagiarism within the CSD.

In a recent blog - CSD Data Curation - The Human Touch -  we’ve described the work that goes on when new structures are added to the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). However, It’s important to realise that this isn’t the end of the story -  as we get close to adding the one millionth structure to the CSD, it seems like an appropriate time to describe some of the processes we undertake at the CCDC to ensure that the data we make available to scientists continues to empower and inform their research long after it’s initial deposition.

Today is International Women’s Day (IWD - #InternationalWomensDay), celebrated each year on the 8^th of March, so what better day to recognise some of the many inspiring women in the field of crystallography.

The beginnings of International Women’s Day started in 1909/1910 but it wasn’t until 1975 that it was adopted by the United Nations. Today IWD is celebrated in many countries worldwide and is even a public holiday for some. IWD can mean different things to different people, for some it is a chance to call for change and improve gender equality, for others it is the perfect opportunity to highlight the achievements of women in their fields and try to inspire a new generation.

We are excited to announce the addition of a polyhedral display style to our Mercury software!

Mercury offers a comprehensive range of tools for 3D structure visualisation, the exploration of crystal packing and the statistical analysis of CSD search data, providing an extensive array of options to aid the investigation and analysis of crystal structures. 

In recognition of the rapidly approaching milestone of one million crystal structures shared through the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), we are involved in the organization of a symposium at the Fall 2019 ACS meeting in San Diego (@AmerChemSociety) that aims to highlight the insights that can be derived from a collection of data such as the CSD. With the abstract deadline for the symposium fast approaching (18^th March) we thought it was the ideal time to tell you a bit more about the CSD and the symposium and encourage you to consider contributing to this session and helping us to mark #CSD1Million.

Rather than tell you how long I have worked at CCDC as a Scientific Editor in the Database Group, perhaps I will instead measure the time in the growth of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) and tell you that when I started working here, the CSD had just passed the 180,000 mark. As I’m sure you know, today, more than 800,000 structures later, we are very close to entering the 1 millionth structure into the CSD.

But what do we mean when we say ‘entering’ data into the CSD, a process we refer to as data curation?