Meetings & Events
Conference Calendar
OneGeochemistry is represented at most of the major, international geoscience and geochemistry conferences. Join us at an upcoming conference to find out more about the initiative and meet the current members; or browse our past events and presentations below. Additional resources can also be found in our Zenodo community.
| Event | Date | Type | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| SciDataCon 2025, Brisbane, AUS | 13-16 Oct 2025 | Session | Coalition building to support sustainable digital data standards |
| GSA Connects 2025, San Antonio, USA | 19-22 Oct 2025 | Lecture | Regarding Resilience of Community Databases |
| eResearch Australasia 2025, Brisbane, AUS | 20-24 Oct 2025 | Session | How and where are you preserving your raw machine observable data for future science? |
| Talk | The AuScope Open Science Ar-Ar Data Pipeline: From Instrument to Earthbank | ||
| AGU 2025, New Orleans, USA | 15-19 Dec 2025 | tbc | AGU25 |
Town Hall: Resilience of Geochemical Databases
9 July 2025: Goldschmidt Conference Prague.
In partnership with the OneGeochemistry initiative, representatives from major global geochemical databases issued a ‘Call to Action’ and held a Town Hall on Database Resilience at the Goldschmidt Conference in Prague, Czechia on 9 July 2025. Over 50 people attended and the goal was to offer a forum for the community to learn, discuss, and take action, towards more resilient data services for the future. The Town Hall aimed to:
- Raise awareness of the growing vulnerability of geochemical community databases.
- Promote the value of community databases for research in geochemistry and beyond.
- Deliberate on how to improve the sustainability and resilience of existing geochemical databases that depend on uncertain public funding.
The panelists included: Lesley Wyborn (AuScope/NCI/ARDC), Gerhard Wörner (DIGIS/GEOROC), Aleco Demetriades (IUGS Commission on Global Geochemical Baselines), Axel Renno (GeoReM, IAG), Mariano Remirez (Geochemical Society). Panelists considered four key scenarios that can threaten geochemical databases: natural disasters, cyberattacks, political interference and loss of funding/staff. Given that many of these threats happen on a national level, it is also essential that strategies are based on international collaboration and agreements regarding storage and access to back-up copies. All panel members emphasised the long term value of geo/cosmochemical databases. Many researchers rely on these publicly available databases to find data for use in research and teaching, or to store their own data when publishing in academic journals or other publication outlets. Unfortunately, many services depend on nationally awarded research grants that may or may not be available consistently and continuously in the future.
Databases in other disciplines that have achieved sustainability (e.g. Protein Database, Earthquake Databases) have in common highly standardised data structures/protocols. Geochemical data are extremely heterogeneous, and there are few accepted protocols and standards to enable interoperability of similar data types. In times of crisis, because of the small size of individual geochemical databases it is technically possible to copy threatened geochemical databases to safer sites. However, the true value in global geochemical databases is the harmonization of diverse and disparate datasets. It is not a question of archiving, therefore, but of integration and interoperability, which requires community agreed standards and protocols.
Consensus was that going forward we need greater involvement of the geochemical societies and of the Early Career Researchers: and above all, sustainable funding. Long term sustainability of geochemical databases requires scientific community backing; a business model that minimizes dependence on research grants; culture change; incentives for researchers to deposit datasets in geochemistry-specific repositories, as well as training and support for early career researchers.
There was agreement that OneGeochemistry should follow up with geochemical societies and associations on raising awareness of the vulnerability of databases and to make this topic a regular discussion at future conferences.
Editors Roundtable 2025
8 July 2025: Goldschmidt Conference Prague.
OneGeochemistry participated in the Editors’ Roundtable organized by the Astromat, DIGIS, and EarthChem cosmo-/geochemical data repositories at the Goldschmidt Conference 2025. The Editors’ Roundtable aims to foster a dialog between geochemical journals, publishers, and curated domain repositories with the goal to coordinate policies and procedures pertaining to the reporting of geo/cosmochemical data. It was first held in 2007/08 and a policy statement ‘Requirements for the Publication of Geochemical Data’ [1] was released in 2009. The Editors’ Roundtable re-started as an annual meeting at the Goldschmidt conference in 2023.
The 2025 Editors’ Roundtable included eleven journals with geo- and cosmochemical relevance: Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry; American Mineralogist; Critical Insights in Geochemistry and Geophysics; Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology; Environmental Geochemistry and Health; Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems; Geostandards & Geoanalytical Research; Icarus; Minerals; Precambrian Research; and Volcanica. Discussions centred around:
- Desire for better data quality vs. effort/resources required (for authors, editors and data systems alike; incl quantity and diversity of data within any one journal)
- Sticks & carrots: journal/publisher/society requirements vs. community culture change
- Question of sustainability of any one data system or consortium: best to rely on alliance of societies? (take inspiration from Elements magazine)
- Promise and opportunities around future automation (file formats, data ingestion, machine readability)
- Examples of success in other disciplines, e.g. crystallography and seismology, that have established specific data management and editorial review processes
- Small steps are better than nothing: encourage self-responsibility rather than trying to get it perfect from the start
With the goal to align data policies and ensure data quality review, repositories and editors revisited the 2009 policy statement [1]. Journal editors committed to enforcing these recommendations; while data systems will make available guidelines and tutorials to support authors. For more information, or to join future meetings, please contact onegeochemistry@codata.org.
At their meeting during the 2008 American Geophysical Union, the Editors Roundtable agreed on a joint editorial policy statement that established a common set of standards for reporting geochemical data. The policy addresses the problem of inconsistency and incompleteness of data and metadata in publications, and helps to facilitate the incorporation of data into digital data collections.
Goldstein, S. L., Hofmann, A. W., Lehnert, K. A., 2014. Requirements for the Publication of Geochemical Data. Version 1.0. Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA). https://doi.org/10.1594/IEDA/100426