<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pjJ6IiNUyME/WCXOylKiZ1I/AAAAAAAAEpo/QFtrderC6DYA5MmsLznmqG8DNFHL71MwACLcB/s1600/splash2.png"></a>I'm excited to have contributed to this important (IMHO) interoperability paper around metabolomics data: &quot;<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v34/n11/full/nbt.3689.html">SPLASH, a hashed identifier for mass spectra</a>&quot; (doi:<a href="http://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3689">10.1038/nbt.3689</a>, readcube:<a href="http://rdcu.be/msZj">msZj</a>). A huge thanks to all involved in the great collaborative project! The <a href="http://splash.fiehnlab.ucdavis.edu/">source code project</a> is fully open source and coordinated by Gert Wolgemuth, the lead author on this paper. It provides an implementation of the algorithm in various programming languages and I'm happy that the <i>splash</i> functionality is available in the just released <a href="http://www.bioclipse.net/news/bioclipse-262-released">Bioclipse 2.6.2</a> (taking advantage of the <a href="https://github.com/berlinguyinca/spectra-hash">Java library</a>). An <a href="https://github.com/berlinguyinca/spectra-hash/tree/master/splashR">R package</a> by Steffen Neumann is also available.<br><br>This new identifier greatly simplifies linking between spectral databases and will in the end contribute to a Linked Data network. Furthermore, journals can start adopting this identifier and list the 'splash' for mass spectra in document, allowing for simplified dereplication and finding additional information around spectra.<br><br>There are several databases that have adopted the SPLASH already, such as <a href="http://massbank.jp/">MassBank</a>, <a href="http://hmdb.ca/">HMDB</a>, <a href="http://www.ebi.ac.uk/metabolights/">MetaboLights</a>, and the <a href="http://osdb.info/">OSDB</a> published in <a href="http://jcheminf.com/">JCheminf</a> recently (doi:<a href="http://doi.org/10.1186/s13321-016-0170-2">10.1186/s13321-016-0170-2</a>).<br><br><br><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cXsJMZfge54/WCXPw8MVB5I/AAAAAAAAEps/osqKx0Wx27kMzhuhkorkHMe-iWQ-tUbpACLcB/s1600/splash.png"></a></td></tr><tr><td>Screenshot snippet of a spectrum in the OSDB.</td></tr></table><i><br></i><i>PS. I personally don't like the idea of ReadCubes (which I may blog about at some point) and how they have been pitched as a &quot;legal&quot; way of sharing papers, but this journal does not have a gold Open Access option, unfortunately.</i><br><br><div><a href="http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/article/14179474"></a> <span>Wohlgemuth, G., Mehta, S. S., Mejia, R. F., Neumann, S., Pedrosa, D., Pluskal, T., Schymanski, E. L., Willighagen, E. L., Wilson, M., Wishart, D. S., Arita, M., Dorrestein, P. C., Bandeira, N., Wang, M., Schulze, T., Salek, R. M., Steinbeck, C., Nainala, V. C., Mistrik, R., Nishioka, T., Fiehn, O., Nov. 2016. SPLASH, a hashed identifier for mass spectra. Nature Biotechnology 34 (11), 1099-1101.</span><br><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3689">http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3689</a></div>