  We present an extensive set of surface and chemisorption energies calculated
using state of the art many-body perturbation theory. In the first part of the
paper we consider ten surface reactions in the low coverage regime where
experimental data is available. Here the random phase approximation (RPA) is
found to yield high accuracy for both adsorption and surface energies. In
contrast all the considered density functionals fail to describe both
quantities accurately. This establishes the RPA as a universally accurate
method for surface science. In the second part, we use the RPA to construct a
database of 200 high quality adsorption energies for reactions involving OH,
CH, NO, CO, N$_2$, N, O and H over a wide range of 3d, 4d and 5d transition
metals. Due to the significant computational demand, these results are obtained
in the high coverage regime where adsorbate-adsorbate interactions can be
significant. RPA is compared to the more advanced renormalised adiabatic LDA
(rALDA) method for a subset of the reactions and they are found to describe the
adsorbate-metal bond as well as adsorbate-adsorbate interactions similarly. The
RPA results are compared to a range of standard density functional theory
methods typically employed for surface reactions representing the various rungs
on Jacob's ladder. The deviations are found to be highly functional, surface
and reaction dependent. Our work establishes the RPA and rALDA methods as
universally accurate full ab-initio methods for surface science where accurate
experimental data is scarce. The database is freely available via the
Computational Materials Repository (CMR).
