Alliance Reshapes Crystallography Data Access

CAMBRIDGE, England and KARLSRUHE, Germany, March 27, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

Structural chemistry's trusted crystallographic database providers join forces to provide single point access to all of the world's small molecule crystal data. 

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (The CCDC) and FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure (FIZ Karlsruhe) today announce 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.  This 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 CSD is the world's repository of published organic and metal-organic crystallographic data, containing over 875,000 entries. The ICSD features more than 185,000 inorganic structures.

"As a researcher and educator at the boundary of these domains, I am particularly excited about the promise of this partnership, both for research and for education in several areas of chemistry, where I am sure it will lead to many insights which otherwise would have been missed," said Professor Paul Raithby, Head of Inorganic Chemistry at Bath University and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the CCDC. "The CCDC's considerable investment in new infrastructure to support data deposition and access has reduced the technology barriers to this project enormously, enabling a partnership which the structural chemistry community has long requested and which it sorely needs. We are very proud to be working with FIZ Karlsruhe to achieve this."

"The community will greatly benefit from the partnership agreed between FIZ Karlsruhe and the CCDC," emphasizes Sabine Brünger-Weilandt, President & CEO of FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure. "All organic and inorganic crystal structure data can be stored and made available through one central portal that is jointly operated by both partners. Thus, scientists can now more easily access the valuable information they need for their research."

Development work on the collaboration has already begun. The first outputs will be released throughout 2017 and will be accessible via http://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk and http://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de. The CSD and ICSD will continue to develop and be available independently from the CCDC and FIZ Karlsruhe, respectively.

The full version of this press release is available here: https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/News/List/2017-03-27-alliance-reshapes-crystallography-data-access/

For more information, please contact:

Paul Davie, CCDC

Helmut Mueller, FIZ Karlsruhe