NOMAD: A Modular Infrastructure Ecosystem for FAIR Research Data Management

Faced with critical global challenges related to energy, sustainability, and technological advancement, research fields like solid-state physics and materials science increasingly turn to data-driven approaches to accelerate discovery and ensure reproducibility. However, the digital transformation required for this shift is often hindered by fragmented and inadequate research data management practices, reliance on unstructured data, and limited data science and IT expertise. In this contribution, we present the NOMAD ecosystem—a modular, open-source research data management (RDM) infrastructure designed to address these challenges by seamlessly integrating data acquisition, curation, publication, and analysis across a federated network of materials science laboratories. Developed within the FAIRmat consortium of Germany's National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), NOMAD enables laboratories to embed FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data practices directly into their everyday research workflows. FAIRmat supports a growing network of self-hosted NOMAD Oasis installations across diverse application scenarios, including high-throughput experimentation with combinatorial material libraries, specialized perovskite solar cell research, advanced multidimensional characterization techniques (e.g., electron microscopy, ARPES), and educational contexts involving open-source tools in academic curricula. This federated framework allows individual laboratories to retain full control over their data while ensuring interoperability within the broader NOMAD community, thus balancing local autonomy with the advantages of global data sharing and collaboration.