Topic updates

23 September 2025

15 September 2025
Reminder on proposal part B page limit and formatting conditions

1. Proposal part B page limit

The title, list of participants and sections 1, 2 and 3, together, should not be longer than page limit, indicated in a proposal part B template inside the Submission System. All tables, figures, references and any other element pertaining to these sections must be included as an integral part of these sections and are thus counted against this page limit.

The page limit will be applied automatically. At the end of a proposal part B template inside the Submission System you can see the structure of the actual proposal that you need to submit, please remove all instruction pages that are watermarked.

If you attempt to upload a proposal longer than the specified limit before the deadline, you will receive an automatic warning and will be advised to shorten and re-upload the proposal. After the deadline, excess pages (in over-long proposals/applications) will be automatically made invisible, and will not be taken into consideration by the experts. The proposal is a self-contained document. Experts will be instructed to ignore hyperlinks to information that is specifically designed to expand the proposal, thus circumventing the page limit.

Please, do not consider the page limit as a target! It is in your interest to keep your text as concise as possible, since experts rarely view unnecessarily long proposals in a positive light.

2.Proposal part B formatting conditions

The following formatting conditions apply (as listed in a proposal part B template inside the Submission System) and will be checked by the Agency during an admissibility check of submitted proposals.

The reference font for the body text of proposals is Times New Roman (Windows platforms), Times/Times New Roman (Apple platforms) or Nimbus Roman No. 9 L (Linux distributions).

The use of a different font for the body text is not advised and is subject to the cumulative conditions that the font is legible and that its use does not significantly shorten the representation of the proposal in number of pages compared to using the reference font (for example with a view to bypass the page limit).

The minimum font size allowed is 11 points. Standard character spacing and a minimum of single line spacing is to be used. This applies to the body text, including text in tables.

Text elements other than the body text, such as headers, foot/end notes, captions, formula's, may deviate, but must be legible.

The page size is A4, and all margins (top, bottom, left, right) should be at least 15 mm (not including any footers or headers).

Proposal part B template inside the Submission System document is tagged. Do not delete the tags; they are needed for our internal processing of information, mostly for statistical gathering. In that light, please do not move, delete, re-order, alter tags in any way, as they might create problems in our internal processing tools. Tags do not affect or influence the outcome of your application.

10 June 2025
Please note that due to a technical issue, during the first days of publication of this call, the topic page did not display the description of the corresponding destination. This problem is now solved. In addition to the information published in the topic page, you can always find a full description of destinations:

* destination 1: Achieving global leadership in climate-neutral, circular and digitised industrial and digital value chains;

* destination 2: Achieving technological leadership for Europe's open strategic autonomy in raw materials, chemicals and innovative materials;

* destination 4: Achieving open strategic autonomy in digital and emerging enabling technologies;

* destination 6: Digital and industrial technologies driving human-centric innovation,

that are relevant for the call in the Work Programme 2025 part for “Industry”. Please select from the work programme the destination relevant to your topic and take into account the description and expected impacts of that destination for the preparation of your proposal.

Materials Commons for Europe (IA)

TOPIC ID: HORIZON-CL4-INDUSTRY-2025-01-MATERIALS-45

Type of grant: Call for proposals

General information

Programme:

Call: INDUSTRY (HORIZON-CL4-2025-01)

Type of action: HORIZON-IA HORIZON Innovation Actions

Type of MGA: HORIZON Action Grant Budget-Based [HORIZON-AG]

Status: Forthcoming

Deadline model: single-stage

Planned Opening Date: 22 May 2025

Deadline dates: 23 September 2025 17:00 (Brussels time)

Topic description

Expected Outcome:

The project is expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

1. 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;
2. Give researchers from industry and academia access to interoperable, heterogeneous and FAIR^[1] data sources and computational tools that support the workflows for the design and development of advanced materials;
3. Address the requirements of experimental workflows for high-quality, well-structured and documented primary data by providing tailored solutions to experimentalists;
4. 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;
5. Devise mechanisms for long term sustainability and expansion to future use cases.

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^[2], 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.
• Fostertrust 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.

To achieve these goals, beneficiaries are in principle expected to be publicly funded organisations with the necessary expertise, which are mandated by their competent ministry. They must be able to function as major (e.g., national or regional) hubs and contact points for stakeholders in national ecosystems, exploring models for participation and contribution, while also working closely with pan-European organisations working on the digitalisation of R&I on advanced materials.

The inclusive nature of the Materials Commons for Europe shall be facilitated through the creation of an advisory board as part of the project composed of relevant ministries or national funding bodies supporting short- and long-term solutions. The applicants are encouraged to consider a project duration of around four years.

The envisioned project should follow the following phases:

1. Phase 1: 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.
• Agreeing on long-term sustainability plan, taking into account academic, industry needs and aspects going beyond R&I.
• Determining compatibility issues and standardisation needs, also in relation to semantic interoperability.
• Setting out key stakeholders, including from academia and industry and related projects and initiatives which will be the users of the infrastructure.

1. Phase 2: Initial build-up

• Building up trust infrastructure and enabling remote access.
• Governance framework for data, computational tools and workflows at operational level.
• Standards and machine readable, domain-specific data schemas and Advanced Programming Interfaces, enabling semantic interoperability and interconnections between different datasets and tools.
• Support for European self-driving labs and their interconnection to the infrastructure, enabling them to reach higher levels of data-driven decision making and automated workflows.

1. Phase 3: 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.
• concrete steps towards sustainability.

Complementarity and synergies should be sought with existing national initiatives such as Material Digital^[3], DIADEM^[4]and CaPeX^[5], as well as with innovation-related strategies, policies, programmes and plans at national and/or regional level. This also extends to EU initiatives such as the proposed “Innovative Materials for EU” partnership, Data Spaces including in particular the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)^[6], EuroHPC^[7] and Open Innovation Testbeds^[8].

The action should also envisage the coordination with a possible mutual learning exercise (MLE) on this topic, targeted to countries leading on this area and those who still need to improve national digital infrastructure, enabling an exchange of experience with digital infrastructures, and creating synergies with ongoing related initiatives.

Proposals should involve appropriate expertise in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), in particular to achieve a user-centred design that facilitates access across different sectors, and by different communities with different characteristics.

[1] Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable

[2] COM(2024) 98 final

[3] https://www.materialdigital.de/

[4] https://pepr-diadem.fr

[5] https://capex.dtu.dk/

[6] https://eosc.eu/

[7] https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/index_en

[8] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/0aaf1e05-2082-11ee-94cb-01aa75ed71a1/language-en

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