Towards Open Science in Materials Synthesis and Characterization: Experiences from the 2DCC

The 2D Crystal Consortium (2DCC) Materials Innovation Platform (MIP) was founded by the NSF in 2016 as a national user facility, combining state-of-the-art materials synthesis and characterization with theory and simulation capabilities, with the goal of making 2D materials available to users across the country. Part of this mandate extends to making the expertise and data developed by the 2DCC accessible, with synthesis recipes and characterization data to be made publicly available after publication of results as registered dataset DOIs. This talk discusses the efforts and challenges of implementing this vision across groups in a university setting, where the data and processes at every level from growth, to fabrication, and characterization need to be captured from a host of various instruments, along with the metadata necessary to make them interpretable. The centerpiece of this is the Lifetime Sample Tracking (LiST) system that organizes this data for thousands of bulk and thin film samples produced by the 2DCC. This data is now accessible for machine learning and data science user proposals. Lastly, I will discuss efforts in moving experimental data from proprietary to open formats, publishing data processing pipelines, and plans for the LiST 2.0 system to achieve the Materials Genome Initiative goal of harnessing the power of materials data.