The crystal structure depot

Why use the depot?

With the digitization of the sciences, the importance of the information infrastructure and its services has grown immensely. The generation, storage, analysis, and visualization of research data requires efficient tools, processes, and systems. The crystal structure depot ensures that crystallographic research data can be stored, curated, and analyzed.

What does the depot offer?

Crystal structures mentioned in scientific publications are stored in the crystal structure depot. Upon deposition, each data set is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) so that the crystal structure is unambiguously identified and registered. The DOI enables third parties to cite and reference data according to the rules of good scientific practice.

You may quote your structure in a publication as follows:

Further details of the crystal structure investigations may be obtained from the joint CCDC/FIZ Karlsruhe online deposition service: https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/structures/? by quoting the deposition number CSD-XXXX.

Service

Many renowned journals in the field of crystallography expressly invite their authors to deposit their published crystal structures with FIZ Karlsruhe. However, scientists may also use our crystal structure depot for data that have not been published. All data are stored in a standardized format, with a focus on inorganic crystal structures. In the depot (offered in collaboration with the Cambridge Crystal Data Centre (CCDC)) the data can be stored at no charge and are available via open access. Each deposited crystal structure may also be published in the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD) and curated and complemented with more information by our experts.

Links

History of the depot

For more than 30 years FIZ Karlsruhe has been offering its service to deposit crystal structures for free.
At the beginning, i.e, when networking was still new and storage capacity expensive, deposition at FIZ Karlsruhe was a valuable aid for researchers worldwide, providing access to inorganic crystal structure data at a central point so that they could be used by all interested scientists.
During the last years it has become more important than ever to have FIZ Karlsruhe as an independent manager of research data, so that everyone can request structure information. To deposit structures with FIZ Karlsruhe means to securely store them with a neutral institution providing reliable access.

When the depot started, all structures were collected, but since 1999 there has been an agreement between the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) and FIZ Karlsruhe that all organic and organometallic compounds should be deposited at CCDC, and all inorganic and intermetallic compounds belong to FIZ Karlsruhe.

In 2018, CCDC and FIZ Karlsruhe launched their joint deposition and access services for crystallographic data across all areas of chemistry so that researchers can share data through a single deposition portal and explore all chemical structures for free worldwide. Thus, researchers and educators all over the world are able to explore over one million crystallographic structures through a joint Access Structures service.
Crystallographers can deposit organic, inorganic and metal-organic structures through a unified deposition service.