Dear NSC Community,
After being the Co-Chair of the ‘Research output management, FAIRness & sharing’ (ROMFS) Working Group for quite some time, I am now falling up the ladder. It will be almost impossible to replace Egon in the role of Chair of this group, but I will take the challenge since these are exciting and important times.
“Nano” is now more and more seen as part of the larger group of advanced materials and “safety” has progressed into the concept of safe-by-design and now also broadened to safe-and-sustainable-by-design. We are still in the progress of performing these transitions and, at the same time, we also need to remember our history to not do the same mistakes over again. Nanomaterials showed very prominently how important small (partly unknown) variations can be regarding functionality but also, and for us more importantly, safety. Thus, identification and full characterisation of the material at hand is an absolute necessity for making sense of the result from safety and sustainability evaluation and to optimise material performance by changing structural parameters. And all this needs to be documented in data, protocols, publications, computational models, Adverse Outcome Pathways,… as well as test guidelines, i.e. in all research outputs, and FAIRly shared. Members of the NSC spearheaded data completeness and FAIRness and this has now to be continued and expanded to advanced materials as part of the immerging European materials digital ecosystem and even needs to be adopted for chemicals like bio-based compounds and polymers, showing similar degrees of uncertainty in their chemical composition.
Our world needs new materials to address the challenges of climate change and raw material supply chain disruption in an atmosphere of political and military uncertainty. I am looking forward to work together with all of you (including but not limited to us data nerds) and especially my two WP Chair colleagues Martin Himly (Working Group ‘Education, Training & Communication’) and Danail Hristozov (Working Group ‘Safe and Sustainable by Design’) that Europe stays in the position to guarantee that these are safe and sustainable.
Thomas Exner