FAQs

All structures undergo automatic validation at the point of deposition and then at the point of publication (either as a CSD Communication or through the publication of an associated scientific article) each structure is also queued for manual curation/enhanced validation. The combination of automatic and manual curation efforts ensures that the CSD continues to be a database you can rely on, the structures are discoverable and the data can be used to generate new insights. 

Typically structures published in an associated scientific article will undergo this enhanced manual enrichment within two weeks of us identifying the publication and during this period they will be marked as “New structure undergoing enhancement” on our Access Structures and WebCSD services.

For CSD Communications we typically wait for at least a month before queuing the structures for manual curation. This is for two reasons, firstly CSD Communications take more manual curation effort since there is no accompanying scientific article to check the chemistry against. Secondly, our investigations have found that some depositors may want to revise their CSD Communication data within a month of deposition or decide in fact they want to publish their data in an associated scientific article instead. We have therefore set a longer curation period to allow for this. 

In some cases our manual curation times may be longer. This can happen for a number of reasons.  Firstly, we may not have identified a deposited structure was published in a scientific article. To ensure we identify published structures, we have established automatic workflows with all the major publishers and we manually search additional journals on a regular basis using third party indexing and search tools. We also contact depositors annually if according to our records their deposited data has not yet been published. If you are unable to locate data on our Access Structures service that has been published then you will be directed to a form where you can provide more information about the publication and we will then update our records accordingly. 

We try to manually curate structures as soon as the corresponding publication is in our system, but in busy periods or for some of the more complicated structures or data sets our typical curation times may be extended. You are still able to access the data during this period using Access Structures and WebCSD and the data will be marked as “New structure undergoing enhancement”.

At regular intervals, typically quarterly, we also provide data updates for our desktop tools. These data updates include all the new curated structures that have been added in that time period.