MaterialsCommons

Advanced materials R&D is crucial to finding solutions for a sustainable future and a competitive European economy. We need innovative materials to address societal challenges such as climate change, technological progress and resource scarcity. However, the current fragmentation in materials science and engineering in Europe hampers collaboration and slows down innovation. MaterialsCommons is a pioneering project designed to address these critical challenges by creating a federated digital infrastructure for advanced materials. This infrastructure connects researchers from both industry and academia while linking currently isolated resources. MaterialsCommons enables cross-sector collaboration and gives unprecedented access to materials and process data for all users, from materials discovery and synthesis to original equipment manufacturers. The technical solution is a machine-actionable multi-node ecosystem, centred around a user-friendly MaterialsCommons web entry point. MaterialsCommons will be a living ecosystem with a variety of tools and services to meet the needs of diverse advanced materials communities. Comprehensive, well-documented schemas will be established, together with terminologies, taxonomies and ontologies that serve as a common language across the broad materials community. An interoperable framework for combining existing workflow environments and corresponding software tools will be provided, making each individual node in the development chain FAIR, machine readable and actionable, and reproducible. The consortium includes 26 academic partners, 21 associated partners and 12 associated collaborators mostly from industry. Six strategically selected use cases from key industrial sectors ensure that the final solution fully meets all user needs, both academic and industrial. Mechanisms will be set up to ensure the long-term sustainability, among others by partners formally committing to continue the infrastructure beyond the project.