The FIP is a collection of FAIR implementation choices made by a community of practice for each of the FAIR Principles.

In the early GO FAIR days, people referred to the challenges and choices. FIPs are a formal approach to report the choices. The days of the implementation networks, like the Chemistry Implementation Network (doi:10.1162/dint_a_00035), or the AdvancedNano network (doi:10.1016/j.impact.2024.100513). For the first, we absolutely agreed on the InChI, for example, but we never wrote that down as a FIP. But even without FIPs, the idea was that communities could learn from each other, could converge. This is where the term FAIR Convergence Matrix comes from. (I had forgotten I was actually part of the matching Working Group. If only I had dedicated funding for it at the time.)

Now, I had on my wishlist to write up a list over FIPs around chemistry. This is relevant for the FAIR4ChemNL project, but obviously beyond that. And while we did a lot of FAIRification work in, particularly, the nanosafety cluster projects (eNanoMapper, NanoCommons, NanoSolveIT, RiskGONE, and SbD4Nano), a lot of this never was formalized as FIPs. Second, various relevant standards have been proposed in chemistry, for chemical compounds and transformation products, among plenty of other things. But during the first ELIXIR Toxicology Community workshop in Utrecht, we had FIPs on the agenda too (see this report).

FIPs in Chemistry

But while I had already several browser tabs open for months, I never could find the courage to start making the list. Silly. Therefore, this list should be considered a start. I don’t think it is exhaustive. I know there is an index somewhere, but I cannot find back that browser tab. Additions are most welcome: I will update this post (thanks to git and Rogue Scholar). In brackets I list (a selection of) the FAIR enabling resources mentioned in that FIP.

• Adverse Outcome Pathways FIP (DOI, AOP Wiki ID)
• Toxicogenomics (ISA-Tab, BioStudies, ArrayExpress)
• WorldFAIR WP04 NANOMATERIALS FIP01 (DOI, ORCID, UUID, ROR, InChI, DataCite, QMRF, RDF/JSON-LD, OWL; doi10.5281/zenodo.7378109)

Is that all? No, I do not think so, but this is all I can easily find (ironically). Well, I guess you now see why I have had a so much trouble starting to write down this post… Someone will surely give me some pointers…

Ackknowledgments

I also like to thank all the people involved in these FIPs. I strongly encourage you to look up all the people who wrote them down. I also like to thank the INTOXICOM workshop FIP experts Iseult Lynch and Gerhard Burger for sharing their knowledge.

Finally, I recommend checking out the FIP Wizard.

Let’s start with what the TDCC actually are: they are Thematic Digital Competence Centres:

The Thematic Digital Competence Centres (TDCCs) are network-based initiatives set up by NWO and the Dutch academic community to broker investments into research data management projects. The three TDCCs are national and discipline based, with one pillar each for the Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH), Natural and Engineering Sciences (NES) and Life Sciences & Health (LSH). The networks will help formulate and facilitate projects designed to promote the adoption of open data, software and research practices, alongside the development of the necessary expertise.

So, where initiatives like GO FAIR had centers of competencies (the implementation networks), they did not have funding for them. This was a main reason why the Chemistry Implementation Network (ChIN, doi:10.1162/dint_a_00035) did not take off. The TDCCs do not provide a lot of money, but enough to support disseminating expertise and promote some key ideas.

The idea is that combined with other efforts, it strengthens the level of FAIR in the Dutch research community. I have to say, this is much needed, as the level of FAIR data in journal publications is so much to wish for, and still mostly absent.

The FAIR4ChemNL project already had a networking activity during the writing of the proposal, the workshop already back in 2024 that I blogged about earlier (see also this report). The FAIRify project is coordinated by the group that was key in the Netherlands Metabolomics Center (NMC), now the BeneLux Metabolomics Center. During a postdoc at the NMC during my Wageningen days, we already did a lot of FAIR competency building with the MetWare project.

The Col-Lab Retreat

The TDCC-NES organized a networking event in August last year, the 2025 TDCC-NES Col-Lab Retreat. I am late with reporting on it, but there simply was too much project management that took priority. The meeting was in the wonderful Dutch town Schoorl, and the location is great for collaborative meetings. I had been there a year earlier for an Open Science Retreat and was happy to go back.

During the unconference-style meeting various topics were discussed in breakout groups, and because of the two TDCC projects, I was particularly interested in the Metadata and interoperability topic. Partly because this is how we can make eletronic lab notebooks automatically push metadata to registries (and Rory Macneil was also in Schoorl, of RSpace/ResearchSpace which already integrated with various open platforms), and partly because I wanted to continue explore nanopublications with Christian Meesters, which could be the envelope to distribute the metadata. For the last, I was looking at the Java library for nanopublications (see this PR.

The idea that ELNs automatically share metadata about experiments is something that is attractive. It would require no involvement from the researcher, would be fully automatic, and drive interest (users, peer reviewers) to experiments and experimental data. Something that is still absurdly hard is to do a search for experiments that measured the melting point of some chemical. How awesome would it be if ELNs would automatically register chemicals from the experiment in, for example, PubChem.

We had the idea of applying for a Lorentz Workshop, but the earliest deadline was too early, but maybe it is time to pick up that idea again. Interoperability standards already exist, like the aforementioned nanopubs, but also RO-Crates that are also studied by Jente Houweling in the VHP4Safety project (see this Data tab for a preview).

Now, about the fediverse…

Mastodon (service by SURF)

Mastodon is one of the more well-known corners of the fediverse, and I blogged about it before. It is intrinsically open, while it has extensive options to make things more private. It is like Twitter but then without the central control. It is unlike Slack, Zulip, and LinkedIn which has clear walls around communities. It also is unlike past efforts like Google Wave and FriendFeed which created much more structured discourse.

But I enjoy Mastodon. It has all the good science, the friendly, helpful people, and I have many options to block people, fediverse servers, and even individual keywords (you can remove anything “PFAS”, for example, something hard in the real world). But you also have linear timeline, with just content of the people you follow.

And, with the SURF social.edu.nl server, every researcher from a SURF-linked research insitute can get an account there via SURFconext (the Mastodon solution may need to be activited by your institute first; if so, ask your institute ICT to enable it). The list of accounts on this SURF Mastodon server shows a veried list of people and organisations, but you can also check this list of 80 Ways to follow Research, Science and Education on Mastodon. Or this list of Wikidata queries.

I think every organization that communicates their research should have at least one open world communication channel, and if they then like to keep their wall-garden LinkedIn account too, that is fine. But societal impact for just a select group of people feels a bit awkward to me.

PeerTube (service by SURF)

But SURF operates a second fediverse server, one using the PeerTube software, also extended with the SURFconext interoperability. PeerTube is a platform to share videos, like YouTube. Just before the winter holiday, I got the opportunity to create two project accounts on SURF’s video.edu.nl, one for the VHP4Safety project and one for the FAIR4ChemNL project.

The cool thing actually is that SURFconext has group accounts via SURFconext Invite (it was earlier called SURFconext Teams), so these two PeerTube channels are operated by two or more people from the project, and the two videos that are now available, have not actually been uploaded by me.

But I am very excited we now have channels to share our video communication, here for VHP4Safety:

And here for FAIR4ChemNL:

But in the past two weeks I did attend two workshops. The first was a workshop by the ELIXIR Toxicology Community, which was held in Utrecht/NL. The programme was around FAIR and included two really nice hands-on sessions where we developed drafts for FAIR Cookbook recipes (see also doi:10.1038/s41597-023-02166-3) and for FAIR Implementation Profiles (doi:10.1007/978-3-030-65847-2_13). We will write up a BioHackrXiv report.

The second workshop was last week, the FAIR4ChemNL workshop, which was also held in Utrecht/NL. The topic was FAIR in chemistry, and we discussed various aspects. There was a significant participant group from the German NFDI4Cat project (“Cat” is short for (chemical) catalysis), which recently published a nice analysis of several ontologies (doi:10.1186/s13321-024-00807-2). And there was also a lot of mention of RDF and SPARQL.

I think it is time for a new special issue around semantic web technologies.