Toward FAIRness and a User-Friendly Repository for Supporting NMR Data

We commend the editors of Organic Letters and The Journal of Organic Chemistry for encouraging the submission of the raw (or primary) supporting data for NMR spectra associated with manuscripts submitted to their journals, described in their editorial jointly published in Organic Letters and The Journal of Organic Chemistry on 12 February, 2020. The availability of FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) raw data and related metadata as described in the editorial is critical to the integrity and advancement of research.

Indeed, the recommendation that raw data be made publicly available goes at least as far back as a 2014 workshop jointly organized by NIH, Nature Publishing Group, and Science to identify opportunities to enhance research rigor. The recommendation from that workshop was that all datasets on which a paper’s conclusions rely must be made available to editors and reviewers upon request (where ethically appropriate) during consideration of the manuscript and made generally available upon reasonable request immediately upon publication. That workshop also recommended that datasets be deposited in public repositories, where such repositories are available. The utility of these data clearly increase more than arithmetically as the body of data available in public repositories grows, allowing for comparisons and other analyses broader than previously readily undertaken by a single research group.

To address the need for a repository and associated tools required to realize this vision of making it convenient and rewarding for investigators to make their raw NMR data FAIR, in January 2019 NIH’s National Center for Complementary & Integrative Health and Office of Dietary Supplements published a call for applications to develop such a resource. Our hope is that the data repository that emerges from this effort will eventually result in making large quantities of NMR data compliant with FAIR principles. Importantly, the project will include the development of powerful tools which will allow users to interact with and manipulate NMR data sets to a much greater extent than is currently possible. The funding opportunity encourages coordination across the research community, including journal editors, on issues such as appropriate standards for data and metadata, and on data sharing. We encourage authors submitting their work to ACS journals to consider this repository in the future as a means to meet the ACS recommendations