MOF++

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For contributors

Deposit a building block

What to prepare, what the licence field means, and how to upload — for holders of the weaver tier.

Depositing needs the weaver tier. If you do not have it, Contribute says how to ask; it is a short conversation, not a form.

Before you upload

Have ready:

  • The structure, as .mfpx. Connectors must be marked — a building block without connection points cannot be placed in a net.
  • A name. It must be unique across all building blocks, organic and inorganic together, and it becomes part of the record's permanent URI. Choose something you are willing to see cited.
  • The connectivity: how many connectors the block offers.
  • A licence. Not optional, and not inherited from a site-wide default at upload time — you state it. CC BY 4.0 unless your institution or funder requires otherwise.

Naming

The name is the identifier. /bb/<name> is the address people will cite, and it must keep resolving indefinitely, so:

  • No version numbers in the name. A corrected structure replaces the record; a genuinely different block is a new record.
  • No spaces or characters that need escaping in a URL.
  • Descriptive beats clever. Someone else has to guess it in six months.

Uploading

From the client:

from mofplus import admin_api

api = admin_api()
api.insert_bb2(name, ...)

Or through the REST core, which is where new work should go — see the API reference for the current deposition endpoints.

After deposit

Your record gets a permanent URI, a machine-readable representation at the same address, and a citation block. It is immediately searchable by everyone, with no account.

What it does not get is a DOI of its own. DOIs here are minted for versioned dataset releases, not per record — why. Your block will appear in the next release, and that release's DOI is what a paper cites alongside the record URI.

Correcting a deposit

Edit in place; the URI does not change. If the correction changes what the record means — a different molecule, not a better geometry — deposit a new record instead and ask a curator to mark the old one superseded. People have cited the old URI, and it must keep resolving to what they cited.