A survey of the community regarding data management practices and availability of raw data in Small Molecule crystallography was conducted in 2019. We will imminently be publishing the findings in the IUCr Newsletter. As a follow-on and under the auspices of CommDat, we are holding a full-day consultation workshop aimed at: (1) educating those who generate and deal in crystallographic data on best practices in data management; (2) understanding how to communicate those best practices to students and other novice users; (3) discussing current practices in data archival and accessibility; (4) exploring current and future use cases for archival and availability of raw data.

This workshop will be beneficial to a large number of small-molecule crystallographers and data scientists. We expect attendees to gain an appreciation of the importance of archiving raw data and an understanding of how to archive their own raw data effectively.  We intend to lay the groundwork for a large-scale community driven effort to standardize small molecule raw data archival with a view to ensuring that best practice in the laboratory leads to appropriate and FAIR availability of raw data to the wider community. A key goal is to explore how to make this process seamless and integrated with current facility, research and publishing practices.