Submissions Open: Materials Commons for Europe (IA)

Deadline: 23-Sep-25

The European Commission is seeking submissions for its initiative titled “Materials Commons for Europe (IA)”.

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, 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.

Funding Information

• Grant amount: 28,000,000

Expected Outcomes

• 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 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.
• The envisioned project should follow the following phases:
  • 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.
  • Initial build-up:
    • Building up trust infrastructure and enabling remote access.
    • Governance framework for data, computational tools and workflows at operational level.
  • 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.

Eligibility Criteria

• To be eligible for funding, applicants must be established in one of the following countries:
  • the Member States of the European Union, including their outermost regions: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden.
  • the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States: Aruba (NL), Bonaire (NL), Curação (NL), French Polynesia (FR), French Southern and Antarctic Territories (FR), Greenland (DK), New Caledonia (FR), Saba (NL), Saint Barthélemy (FR), Sint Eustatius (NL), Sint Maarten (NL), St. Pierre and Miquelon (FR), Wallis and Futuna Islands (FR).
  • countries associated to Horizon Europe:  Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Faroe Islands, Georgia, Iceland, Israel, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Tunisia, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom.

For more information, visit European Commission.