On February 18, 2026, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina welcomed its newly elected members at a special ceremony in Halle. We are proud to announce that Prof. Claudia Draxl, FAIRmat’s spokesperson and Einstein Professor of Physics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, received her official membership certificate.

The FAIRmat community warmly congratulates Prof. Draxl on this outstanding achievement, which highlights her significant scientific contributions to condensed-matter theory, computational materials science, and the advancement of data-centric approaches in materials research. Her election to the Leopoldina recognizes both her scientific excellence and her commitment to strengthening the foundations of open science. Through her leadership at FAIRmat, she advances transparent and reusable research data practices, enabling scientists worldwide to collaborate more effectively and accelerate innovation in materials research.

The 8th edition of the FAIRmat newsletter is now available for download. The past six months have brought lots of exciting developments. Here is a glimpse of what you will find in this issue:

• The FAIRmat infrastructure: Lauri Himanen on the release of NOMAD version 1.4.0 and the alpha launch of the new graphical user interface.
• Project milestones: an updated scaling overview and new NeXus standards for a wide range of materials-science experiments.
• Project news: submission of the FAIRmat renewal proposal to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the launch of the FAIRmat spin-off Glaide Data GmbH.

In addition, the issue features user and expert interviews, an opinion article, and further insights from across the consortium.

You can read and download the full newsletter via the link below.

Last week, the FAIRmat team joined Love Data Week 2026, an international initiative promoting the value of good data management practices. This year’s theme, "Where’s the Data?", inspired a series of engaging online events from February 9 to 13.

The week kicked off with the workshop "Challenges in Data Reusability", co-hosted with DAPHNE4NFDI and the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC). Participants explored common challenges in making research data reusable and discussed strategies to overcome them.

On February 10, Siamak Nakhaie led a coffee talk titled "19M+ FAIR Data Entries and Growing – How NOMAD is Transforming Physics and Materials Research", highlighting the NOMAD platform’s role as a free, community-driven resource for experimental and computational materials data.

Throughout the week, FAIRmat also ran a dedicated social media series answering the question "Where’s the Data in NOMAD?" and showcasing what happens to the data once uploaded to the platform. Check out our LinkedIn page for more information.

Let’s keep the spirit of Love Data Week alive and continue strengthening FAIR data practices together all year round!

The recordings of the talks from the Seventh FAIRmat Users Meeting, held on November 20, 2025, are now available online. The full playlist features the following contributions:

• FAIRmat and NOMAD: Recent Updates and Emerging Use Cases – José A. Márquez
• NOMAD Data Management Workflow for Multidimensional Time-Resolved Photoemission Data – Laurenz Rettig
• NOMAD Oasis for the Solid-State NMR Community – Sathya Sai Seetharaman
• FAIR Data Management for Fabrication Processes. A Plugin as Implemented at CNR-IFN@TN – Matteo Bontorno
• Extending NOMAD with Plugin and Metadata Support for EPR, NMR, and EFG – Cecilia Zagni
• Seamless Data to Discovery: Digitalizing Electrocatalysis with NOMAD – Carla Terbove and Marcel Risch

Subscribe to the FAIRmat and NOMAD YouTube channel to stay informed about newly published recordings.

Last week, the FAIRmat community gathered for the seventh semi-annual Users Meeting – a key event for scientists and data stewards in physics, chemistry, and materials science who are committed to advancing research data management (RDM) and accelerating scientific discovery.

The morning session featured presentations by NOMAD users and collaborators, demonstrating the versatility of NOMAD and its ability to adapt to diverse research needs. Recordings of the talks will soon be available on our YouTube channel:

• NOMAD Data Management Workflow for Multidimensional Time-Resolved Photoemission Data – Laurenz Rettig (Fritz Haber Institute)
• NOMAD Oasis for the Solid-State NMR Community – Sathya Sai Seetharaman (Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK)
• FAIR Data Management for Fabrication Processes. A Plugin as Implemented at CNR-IFN@TN – Matteo Bontorno (SISSA)
• Extending NOMAD with Plugin and Metadata Support for EPR, NMR, and EFG – Cecilia Zagni (eXact lab s.r.l.)
• Seamless Data to Discovery: Digitalizing Electrocatalysis with NOMAD – Carla Terbove (HZB) and Marcel Risch (HZB)

In the afternoon, two hands-on workshops introduced participants to getting started with NOMAD, structuring data, and using NOMAD in different roles. Topics covered everything from basic GUI functions to plugin development and NOMAD Oasis administration.

The event concluded with the Users-Meet-Developers exhibit, where participants showcased their RDM workflows, plugins, custom schemas, data analysis tools, and other tailored solutions. The session created a dynamic space for exchange, collaboration, and inspiration.

We look forward to welcoming you to the next Users Meeting in summer 2026 – and stay tuned for more exciting events to come!

Last week, FAIRmat participated in the MADICES 2025 workshop, an event that brought together leading initiatives in materials data infrastructure and computational science. The meeting served as a vibrant forum for discussing how different projects across Europe can collaborate to make research data more interoperable, reusable, and aligned with FAIR principles.

Representing FAIRmat, Dr. Joseph Rudzinski co-organized the event and gave an overview of interoperability features within the NOMAD platform, highlighting ongoing developments that connect experimental and computational workflows through flexible routes to FAIR data provenance storage.

In the workshop’s breakout sessions, participants explored practical strategies for bridging diverse electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) and research data management (RDM) systems. The discussions led to two new NOMAD plugin prototypes demonstrating how data from different sources can be integrated via common exchange formats – an important step toward transparent, reproducible research across scientific communities.

Beyond the technical progress, MADICES 2025 reinforced the shared vision that collaboration between infrastructures is essential for building a connected and sustainable research data ecosystem. The workshop concluded with a roadmap for continued cooperation between the participating consortia, ensuring that tools like NOMAD remain at the forefront of open, interoperable data management.

FAIRmat participated in and co-organized a Research Data Management (RDM) Workshop for the DFG Research Unit "Energy Landscapes and Structure in Ion Conducting Solids (ELSICS)". The workshop took place at Marburg University from October 9 to 10, 2025, in collaboration with NFDI4Chem and ELSICS.

The program began with an introduction to the fundamentals of RDM, followed by presentations from NFDI4Chem and FAIRmat. Our team presented the NOMAD ecosystem, highlighting how it supports the management, sharing, and reuse of research data in condensed-matter physics and materials science. Afterwards, ELSICS spokesperson Karl-Michael Weitzel provided an overview of the research unit and its ongoing projects. Researchers from various ELSICS subprojects shared insights into their work and the data they generate, including file formats, data volumes, and the tools they use. Their contributions offered a valuable overview of the consortium’s data landscape and helped shape tailored recommendations for best practices.

The second day featured four thematic workshops on key aspects of RDM: selecting a repository, the advantages of using electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs), standardization and metadata, and collaboration and data sharing. The discussions focused on how these topics can improve scientific workflows, enhance reproducibility, and promote the adoption of effective, sustainable data management strategies.

The workshops showcased how NOMAD Oasis can facilitate collaboration within research consortia by enabling shared access to data, metadata, and experimental samples under well-defined conditions. For the FAIRmat team, the event provided an excellent opportunity to better understand the RDM needs and practices of research units like ELSICS, thereby strengthening the dialogue between infrastructure providers and the scientific community.

We are proud to announce that FAIRmat has reached a major milestone in data standardization. In close collaboration with the NeXus International Advisory Committee (NIAC), our experts have extended the NeXus data format – originally developed for X-ray, neutron, and muon science – into a cross-domain standard for experimental data in materials science.

The latest update introduces new application definitions for:

• Atom Probe Microscopy (NXapm): standardized data exchange for atom probe experiments.
• Electron Microscopy (NXem): a unified standard for scanning and transmission EM and focused-ion beam capabilities of such instruments.
• Optical Spectroscopy (NXoptical_spectroscopy, NXellipsometry, NXraman): a common framework for experiments with tailored optical setups.
• Photoemission Spectroscopy (NXmpes, NXmpes_arpes, NXxps): multidimensional data support across different photoemission instruments.

Additional base classes also improve the description of experimental geometries and component calibrations.

NeXus development follows a transparent, community-driven process: new definitions are openly discussed and refined on GitHub before being adopted as official standards. FAIRmat's sustained contributions have been essential in shaping this process, ensuring that NeXus remains both domain-specific and interoperable across disciplines.

These new definitions are already fully integrated into our research data management platform NOMAD, allowing researchers to upload, explore, search, and share NeXus-formatted data directly on the platform. NOMAD preserves the structural semantics of NeXus and makes them interoperable with other materials data through its schema-based Metainfo system.

By combining standardization efforts in NeXus with the powerful infrastructure of NOMAD, FAIRmat helps researchers with agreeing on how data should look like and working with these in practice.

We are excited to share that a new FAIRmat paper has been published in Nature Communications! In the article, titled "Towards an interoperable perovskite description or how to keep track of 300 perovskite ions", the authors propose guidelines and a standardized JSON schema for reporting perovskite compositions.

Hybrid perovskites are a cornerstone of modern optoelectronics, but their vast compositional flexibility has led to confusion and inconsistencies in the way materials are described. With the increasing importance of machine learning and data mining tools, ensuring computational readability has become an important concern.

To address these challenges, the work introduces a JSON schema that follows IUPAC recommendations and enables both human- and machine-readable descriptions of perovskite materials. This schema captures descriptors including composition, molecular formula, SMILES representation, IUPAC name, and CAS number for more than 300 identified perovskite ions.

In addition, the team provides utilities that automatically generate standardized descriptions from common abbreviations and coefficients, as well as a curated database of all identified ions. The Hybrid Perovskite Ions Database is available via the NOMAD API, enabling researchers worldwide to upload, share, and reuse consistent perovskite data in line with FAIR principles.

The proposed approach not only eliminates ambiguities in reported perovskite compositions but also enables better use of the rapidly growing body of perovskite data for machine learning and computational studies.

On September 11-12, FAIRmat hosted a successful on-site part of the 3rd LLM (Large Language Models) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, welcoming participants from across Germany. This was part of a global event that brought together more than 1,200 people, both virtually and in person. For two full days, the participants gathered at the main campus of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin to find new ways of accelerating discoveries in materials and chemistry with artificial intelligence (AI).

This year’s projects highlighted how AI is moving beyond simple text generation to become a true partner in science. The tools are now helping researchers plan experiments, test ideas, and even catch mistakes. They can guide entire processes – from setting up a computer simulation to improving a design step by step. Some projects showed how combining information from many sources and linking it together makes the systems smarter and more adaptable to scientific challenges.

FAIRmat not only hosted the hackathon but was also represented by three teams: Parse Patrol, Ragalicious, and MatterMinds. Out of 121 submissions worldwide, Parse Patrol and Ragalicious received Visionary Awards for their outstanding ideas and were invited to present in a special showcase session.

The success of the Berlin site was also recognized internationally. Science Magazine featured it in an article by Zack Savitsky, Researchers customize AI tools at global ‘hackathon’, which highlights how LLMs are being customized for scientific discovery, the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, and the crucial role of high-quality research data.