The STRENDA Commission (STandards for Reporting ENzymology Data, www.beilstein-strenda.org) made up of experts from the enzyme chemistry community and supported by the Beilstein-Institut, has developed the STRENDA Guidelines in tight consultation with the community. The aim is to improve the quality of enzyme function data in the literature. Today, more than 55 biochemical journals already recommend authors to refer to these guidelines when reporting enzyme kinetics data.
To enable scientists to easily prepare data for manuscripts, the STRENDA Commission has developed a web-based portal for the direct electronic submission of data by the authors prior to publication. This portal called STRENDA DB provides an assessment tool with which authors, journals’ editors and reviewers can check whether the reporting of experimental data is compliant with the STRENDA guidelines and thus matches the instructions for authors from the journals. The data entered are stored in STRENDA DB and will be made publically accessible after they have been published in a journal. More than 20 biochemical journals recommend their authors to deposit their experimental data in STRENDA DB.
In order to facilitate an easy access and rapid data input, it is planned to implement the data upload via EnzymeML. EnzymeML is a community developed data exchange format whose first version provides an API with Python and Java libraries to be integrated into both applications and databases.
As data exchange standards and software support to aid research data management was considered lacking, the community developed the data exchange format EnzymeML. In addition, a first version of an application programming interface provides Python and Java libraries to be integrated in both applications and databases in order to drive a seamless data flow from the bench to publication platforms.
Last but not least, some insights into the FAIRness of STRENDA DB and the data stored therein will be provided.
Carsten Kettner studied biology at the University of Bonn and obtained his diploma at the University of Göttingen. In 1999, he was awarded his PhD for his work on the biophysical comprehension of the yeast vacuolar ATPase using the patch-clamp techniques in the group of Adam Bertl at the University of Karlsruhe. As a post-doctoral student he continued both the studies on the biophysical properties of the pump and the investigation of the kinetics and regulation of the plasma membrane potassium channel (TOK1). In 2000, he joined the Beilstein-Institut. Here, he is responsible (a) for the organization of the Beilstein symposia, (b) for the administration and project management of funded research projects and (c) for the marketing of the Beilstein-Institut's projects, especially the Beilstein Journals.
In 2007 he was awarded his certificate of competence as project manager for his studies and thesis from the Studiengemeinschaft Darmstadt (a certified service provider). Since 2004 he coordinates the work of the STRENDA commission and promotes guidelines for reporting enzyme data along with the commissioners (www.strenda.org). These reporting standards have been adopted by, today, over 55 biochemical journals for their instructions for authors and are incorporated in the electronic data validation and storage tool, STRENDA DB.
Since 2011, Carsten co-ordinates the MIRAGE project which aims at establishing uniform reporting and representation of glycomics data in publications and which became an essential hub for the development of glycomics infrastructure (www.beilstein-mirage.org). In 2014, Carsten was appointed the head of the funding and conferences department which is also in charge of the foundation’s public relationships. He is very interested in any aspects of open science and open access and thus he is actively engaged in a number of initiatives that are dedicated to make scientific data open and accessible to the wider public including NFDI4Chem, Force11 and RDA (Chemical Data, FAIRsharing).
