D10.6 - Final Version of NanoCommons Sustainability Plan

NanoCommons was funded as an infrastructure project for a starting community. This means that it was supposed to build the concepts and foundation on which the community can continue to build solutions and services; in the case of NanoCommons, the infrastructure goal was to address the starting community’s data and nanoinformatics needs. NanoCommons did not start entirely from scratch, as it was building on efforts of the Nanosafety Cluster’s Working Group F on data management, and benefited from a general appreciation of the value of data reuse and computational predictions in the community. The push towards increasing use of chemoinformatics and nanoinformatics approaches was also endorsed by the public, regulatory and funding agencies, including being accelerated by the European ban on animal testing in the cosmetics industry and the European Green Deal. Similarly, industry is increasingly acting as a driver: fostering implementation and adoption of data harmonisation, FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of data) and openness and recognising that these activities require targeted and centralised efforts, which were provided by NanoCommons. However, a starting community is just that: a start upon which the community can build, a coalescence point around which collective efforts can nucleate. Our journey is still at the earliest stages, and much is needed in terms of automation, tooling, and continued training and education to drive the mindset changes within the community to fully embed data management at the start of the data lifecycle. Sustained and continuous support will be needed to achieve sufficient levels of digitalisation, global adoption of reporting standards both in scientific and regulatory settings, and machine-readability and machine-actionable data, all of which will lead to better quality and reproducible research, and more trust in the data and understanding of its applicability and suitability for reuse thus enhancing the value of the data and knowledge generated. This starts with sustaining what we already have, which in our case is the NanoCommons Knowledge Infrastructure, the implemented services from NanoCommons, as well as other associated partners and projects, and the collaboration with other projects established beyond the borders of nanosafety research.

The term sustainability can be described as “the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level”. Applied to NanoCommons, this means that the services/tools/materials that were designed and developed during the project and are already being offered to support the nanosafety community will continue to be maintained and ideally further developed, beyond the end of the funded period of the project, ensuring future accessibility for users and potential customers. Since there will be no direct public funding for these services anymore (pending further applications via Horizon Europe for example), planning for sustainability and creation of a (not necessarily commercial) business model were started very early in the project as a central task of WP10 and possible options were continuously evaluated and adapted based on stakeholder feedback coming from surveys and, more importantly, from users of the starting infrastructure services and expertise who received support in the form of Transnational Access (TA) projects or as part of the Demonstration Cases (see deliverable reports D9.3 and D9.4 for details of the first and second round Demonstration Cases, respectively).

Deliverable D10.6 presented here builds on the previous deliverables D10.4 “First Testing and Evaluation Results of NanoCommons Sustainability Plan” and D10.5 “Second Testing and Evaluation Results on the NanoCommons Sustainability Plan”, proposing the first version of the business model and analysing all project activities related to sustainability during the last period, respectively. Together, these three reports outline the considerations and activities undertaken with the aim of ensuring the sustained existence and utilisation of the NanoCommons project outcomes beyond the project lifetime. A major NanoCommons objective has been to achieve a sustainable and open knowledge infrastructure for the whole nanosafety community, and thus a considerable effort was invested in exploring the options and approaches, focussing on those business models consistent with the ethos of openness and accessibility, given the public funding used to develop the services, and the critical importance of access to Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) data globally. In this final deliverable, evaluation of the TAs and Demonstration Cases with respect to their (potential) contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is completed by looking at the results from the third funding period. Additionally, the targeted activities with the strategic partners most of whom were previously identified as significant routes via which to sustain and further develop the NanoCommons tools and services, are summarised. The NanoCommons focus areas for short/long term sustainability are presented, along with the justifications of these choices. All of this information is then condensed into the final NanoCommons sustainability plan.