Abstract
Mindat is a community-driven, free-access, online database platform that records information about all known mineral species and their worldwide distribution. Started as a private database project in 1993 it has been running on the internet since 2000 and has since become a powerful resource for both education and scientific research. The OpenMindat project will, for the first time, allow automated querying and downloads from this data resource for academic research. This effort will involve moving all appropriate data into an Open Science compatible license, building and operating a web-based platform for both automated queries and bulk data downloads, preparing all documentation on the use of this data and building a suite of developer tools including packages in Python and R for direct data access from workflow platforms. The Mindat database has been used effectively since 2010 in data-driven geoscience research and has underpinned hundreds of scientific publications every year, but to do so has required Mindat to prepare individual agreements with researchers and to provide data extracts manually. The new open data developments in OpenMindat will allow researchers to access the data without such barriers. This will be a powerful boost for many potential research topics in geoscience. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation EarthCube program (NSF #2126315).