Paper: "The NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE): facilitating European and worldwide collaboration on suspect screening in high resolution mass spectrometry"

When you get asked to contribute your expertise, you do. To me, this is perfectly in line with doing open science. Sometimes it's a skill rather than knowledge. But when this helps a project that practices open science I would be insane not to. When you get asked to be listed as an co-author, it is an honor. Author lists have changed and much can be said about this. Essential contributions should be reflected in co-authorships. After all, scholars recognize and rewards research still mostly based on articles counts. Indeed, when in 2008 I was offered an co-authorship and I declines because I considered my contributions not significant (but obvious instead), even though the first author found it essential to the development of the article, I was later significantly confronted about my low number of articles. The scholarly system is like that.

Being able to contribute to the NORMAN network has been a great pleasure. It describes itself as a "network [that] enhances the exchange of information on emerging environmental substances, and encourages the validation and harmonisation of common measurement methods and monitoring tools so that the requirements of risk assessors and risk managers can be better met. It specifically seeks both to promote and to benefit from the synergies between research teams from different countries in the field of emerging substances" on their website.

That aligns very well with, for example, the Wikidata research I do to link chemical databases and chemical structures to research articles. One could argue that open science has properly proven itself by now as sustainable and high quality platform, not all scholars are yet convinced. So, more research results are needed. What are the problems? We found scalability, capturing experimental accuracy, publishing biases, etc. Are there limits? We regularly run into experimental error limiting the level of detail, we run into limitations of our legal frameworks, we run into the complexities of chemical reality, but mostly we run into social and psychological issues with researchers.

So, where does this put me in respect to the awesome publication by the NORMAN network: "The NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE): facilitating European and worldwide collaboration on suspect screening in high resolution mass spectrometry" (doi:10.1186/s12302-022-00680-6)? How did I end up as co-author on this paper? Why is this paper important to cheminformatics?

First, how did I contribute to this paper: some years ago, I think it was at one of the ELIXIR BioHackathon Europe meetings, Emma Schymanski and I were discussion the NORMAN data. I don't remember the details, but I do remember the outcome: NORMAN data should be uploaded to Zenodo. And this is basically my contribution to the paper: we worked out the idea of using Zenodo to publish the data, test the FAIRness, look into the reusability. You will find some of the NORMAN compounds in Wikidata, citing the NORMAN dataset.

That last is what is important here. I started this blog co-authorships, recognition, and rewarding. I described how scholars like ranking people by the number of their articles and citations (this IS changing, even tho some scholars have been putting up a significant resistance). Being able to track provenance, enable peer review, and cite previous research in such a way that readers can easily find that citations, those are important features. It's just that journal articles are just one form of research output, and most certainly not the most qualitative anymore.

This is where Zenodo comes in. It is an archive, created a unique identifier (DOI) for the data, allows recording authorships, and even provides versioning (figure from article, CC-BY):

This FAIR and open metadata is easily propagated to other platforms, e.g. with Scholia and citation.js into scholia:Q115588535. 

Citing research output must become generally accepted and that research output cannot be just journal articles, books, and book chapters. These media are unsuited for detailed research output communication. Let's start with making DataCite and Software Citations routine and recognize and reward these forms our research output too by using cito:usesMethodIn and cito:usesDataFrom.