Nanotechnologies and the resulting novel and emerging materials (NEMs) represent major areas of investment and growth for the European economy. Recent advances have enabled confidence in the understanding of what constitutes toxicity of NEMs in relation to health and environmental hazards. However, the nanotechnology and nanosafety communities remain disparate and unconnected, whilst knowledge and data remain fragmented and inaccessible, such that from a data integrating and mining perspective it is clearly a “starting community”. The field, and indeed the European open knowledge economy, requires conversion of these scientific discoveries into legislative frameworks and industrial applications, which can only be achieved through concerted efforts to integrate, consolidate, annotate and facilitate access to the disparate datasets. NanoCommons brings together academia, industry and regulators to facilitate pooling and harmonising of methods and data for modelling, safe-by-design product development and regulatory approval purposes, thereby driving best practice and ensuring maximum access to data and tools. Networking Activities span community needs assessment through development of demonstration case studies (e.g. exemplar regulatory dossiers). Joint Research Activities will integrate existing resources and organise efficient curation, preservation and facilitate access to data/models. Transnational Access will focus on standardisation of data generation workflows across the disparate communities and establishment of a common access procedure for transnational and/or virtual access to the data, and modelling and risk prediction/management tools developed and integrated. Given the extremely rapid pace of development of nanoinformatics, NanoCommons’s detailed workplan will be prescribed for the first 18 months, beyond which it will be co-developed with stakeholders on a rolling call basis to ensure maximum responsiveness to community needs.

CODATA and RDA will work with a set of domain and cross-domain case studies to implement and test FAIR recommendations, including those for core interoperability, to develop a set of recommendations and a framework for FAIR assessment in each discipline or cross-disciplinary research areas involved. CODATA and RDA are uniquely positioned to lead and coordinate this activity, as the two preeminent international, interdisciplinary data organisations. The Case Studies have been carefully chosen to provide maximum impact. They are clustered in cognate groups in order to maximise scope while retaining a critical mass of activity and allowing learning and cross-fertilisation of ideas among them. Drawn from CODATA and RDA activities and partnerships, the Case Studies include leading organisations in a range of disciplines and cross-disciplinary research areas, such that the outputs will have global influence and impact. The methodology is designed to maximise coordination, while being sensitive to the status and requirements of each Case Studies discipline or cross-disciplinary research area. Each Case Study will perform a lightweight benchmarking and information gathering exercise through preparing a FAIR Implementation Profile, appropriately adapted to their discipline. This will lead into, and help inform, a fuller mapping of current best practices and emerging solutions and initiatives in their discipline. Taking into account good practices in their disciplines as well as the draft framework for core interoperability, and pertinent RDA recommendations, each case study will develop, pilot and possibly deploy interoperability standards and guidelines. Finally, the reports and recommendations from each Case Study will be synthesized and used to develop discipline specific frameworks for FAIR assessment and benchmarks.