About

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.

 

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.