2nd CFP: Contribute to Building Open, Structured Scientific Experiment Descriptions
Jennifer D'Souza
Dear colleagues,
We invite contributions to a community-driven effort to structure how scientific experimental and simulation workflows are described in research papers, across applied natural sciences and engineering.
Many ML applications rely on scientific datasets, yet the processes behind them (e.g., PCR, RNA-seq, ALD/CVD, tensile or fatigue testing, soil leaching experiments, drug dissolution assays, fMRI tasks) are typically described only in free text and in highly inconsistent ways. This makes comparison, reproducibility, FAIR reuse, and ML-based reasoning over methods extremely difficult.
Our goal is simple:
from collections of papers describing the same process, we extract and refine a shared, structured description of that workflow (steps, inputs, parameters, tools, outputs), together with domain experts. These process descriptions will be published openly as ORKG templates and form the basis of a planned Nature Scientific Data paper.
Provide a collection of full-text papers (~50+) describing a specific experimental or simulation process, and/or
Give expert feedback on the extracted workflow structure.
Individual or small-team participation is welcome; co-authorship opportunities are available depending on involvement.
A non-exhaustive list of example processes is available here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iyL1l9vCXhnQ0To7j79vlr-pW4JvPlQC95svygqRDfg/edit
👉 Register your interest: https://forms.gle/9WEdouw4yMyNHcn19
Selected contributors will be notified by Jan 31, 2026; data collection runs until Apr 30, 2026.
We hope you’ll consider contributing to this effort to make scientific processes more transparent, comparable, and ML-ready — and we’d appreciate your help spreading the word.
Best regards,
Jennifer D’Souza
TIB Hannover
(on behalf of the schema-miner coordination team)