Guide and data requirements for submission of mineral deposit mineral chemistry data in the Critical Minerals in Ores - Mineral Chemistry (CMiO-MIN) database

The Critical Minerals in Ores - Mineral Chemistry (CMiO-MIN) database (Hawkins et al., 2026) is designed to capture ore and ore-related mineral compositional data from critical mineral-bearing deposits across the globe. Samples included within this database must be well-characterised and come from localities that have been sufficiently studied to have a reasonable constraint on their deposit type and environment of formation. As such, only samples analysed by modern geochemical methods, and with certain minimum metadata attribution, can be accepted. Data that is submitted to the CMiO-MIN database will also be published via the Geoscience Australia Portal (portal.ga.gov.au) and Critical Minerals Mapping Initiative Portal (www.criticalminerals.org).

The CMiO-MIN database is a companion database for the Critical Minerals in Ores (CMiO) database (Champion et al., 2021) that was first published in 2021. This guide draws heavily from the submission guide for CMiO (Case et al., 2024) to ensure similar processes for each database. For more information about the CMiO database please refer Champion et al. (2021) and Case et al. (2024; 2025).