Materials Commons for Europe (IA)

Expected Outcome:The project is expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Create a pioneer federated digital infrastructure for advanced materials research and development, demonstrating use cases facilitating industrial uptake and offering a feedback loop to academic research;
• Give researchers from industry and academia access to interoperable, heterogeneous and FAIR[1] data sources and computational tools that support the workflows for the design and development of advanced materials;
• Address the requirements of experimental workflows for high-quality, well-structured and documented primary data by providing tailored solutions to experimentalists;
• Provide a framework to support self-driving labs using the digital infrastructure, enabling to use of state-of-the-art AI technologies and predictive modelling techniques in industry and academia;
• Devise mechanisms for long term sustainability and expansion to future use cases.

Scope:This action will accelerate R&I in the area of advanced materials by bringing together at EU level experience, knowledge and resources, from existing and new national digital infrastructures for advanced materials design and development.

It will set the ground for the implementation of a long term sustainable European digital infrastructure for advanced materials R&I as announced in the Communication on Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership[2], supporting academic and industrial collaborations.

Such a digital infrastructure should:

• Interconnect existing and new infrastructures devoted to advanced materials design and development across the EU supported by AI tool and facilitate access to High-Performance Computing facilities.
• Help researchers and innovators from across Europe to significantly accelerate the design, development, characterisation and testing of new or improved advanced materials in a controlled environment.
• Foster trust in data sharing among stakeholders (including researchers, research organisations, industry and SMEs) based on FAIR data principles, while also fostering common materials taxonomies, ontologies and data interoperability.
• Be based on an inclusive approach that fosters contributions from academia and industry, across different sectors, using a user-centric view that takes into account intellectual property rights and ownership.
• Support virtual design of advanced materials and related processing. Foster the progress towards self-driving labs which are widely accessible to European researchers.

To achieve these goals, beneficiaries are in principle expected to be publicly funded organisations with the necessary expertise, which are mandated by their competent ministry. They must be able to function as major (e.g., national or regional) hubs and contact points for stakeholders in national ecosystems, exploring models for participation and contribution, while also working closely with pan-European organisations working on the digitalisation of R&I on advanced materials.

The inclusive nature of the Materials Commons for Europe shall be facilitated through the creation of an advisory board as part of the project composed of relevant ministries or national funding bodies supporting short- and long-term solutions. The applicants are encouraged to consider a project duration of around four years.

The envisioned project should follow the following phases:

• Phase 1: Planning and Framework Establishment
• Developing functional and non-functional requirements and identifying existing solutions (e.g., cloud solutions, middleware, data spaces) that can be used to accelerate, or be integrated into, the infrastructure. Identification of possible use of existing infrastructures and resources, including support for and integration of self-driving labs.
• Planning a governance framework, able to implement the infrastructure meeting the functional and non-functional requirements, including a strategy for adhesion of new entities in the long term.
• Agreeing on long-term sustainability plan, taking into account academic, industry needs and aspects going beyond R&I.
• Determining compatibility issues and standardisation needs, also in relation to semantic interoperability.
• Setting out key stakeholders, including from academia and industry and related projects and initiatives which will be the users of the infrastructure.
• Phase 2: Initial build-up
• Building up trust infrastructure and enabling remote access.
• Governance framework for data, computational tools and workflows at operational level.
• Standards and machine readable, domain-specific data schemas and Advanced Programming Interfaces, enabling semantic interoperability and interconnections between different datasets and tools.
• Support for European self-driving labs and their interconnection to the infrastructure, enabling them to reach higher levels of data-driven decision making and automated workflows.
• Phase 3: Demonstration
• Integration of workflows and tools, including those aimed at creation of primary data.
• 5 use cases across different sectors and related demonstrators, facilitating industrial uptake and offering a feedback loop to academic research.
• concrete steps towards sustainability.

Complementarity and synergies should be sought with existing national initiatives such as Material Digital[3], DIADEM[4] and CaPeX[5], as well as with innovation-related strategies, policies, programmes and plans at national and/or regional level. This also extends to EU initiatives such as the proposed “Innovative Materials for EU” partnership, Data Spaces including in particular the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)[6], EuroHPC[7] and Open Innovation Testbeds[8].

The action should also envisage the coordination with a possible mutual learning exercise (MLE) on this topic, targeted to countries leading on this area and those who still need to improve national digital infrastructure, enabling an exchange of experience with digital infrastructures, and creating synergies with ongoing related initiatives.

Proposals should involve appropriate expertise in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), in particular to achieve a user-centred design that facilitates access across different sectors, and by different communities with different characteristics.

[1] Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable

[2] COM(2024) 98 final

[3] https://www.materialdigital.de/

[4] https://pepr-diadem.fr

[5] https://capex.dtu.dk/

[6] https://eosc.eu/

[7] https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/index_en

[8] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/0aaf1e05-2082-11ee-94cb-01aa75ed71a1/language-en