Developing new antimicrobial coatings is not only about making materials that work in the lab. It also means generating large amounts of high-quality data – about coating composition, performance against microbes, safety for people, and environmental sustainability – and making sure that this information can be found, understood, and reused by the project partners throughout the project.

That is why NOVA created a Data Management Plan and later produced an update on how it worked in practice. Together, these two documents describe how NOVA organised its research data so that results from many different laboratories could be combined into a coherent knowledge base.

In the Data Management Plan, we set the rules and structures for data handling across the project. The goal was to ensure that data produced in NOVA would be reliable, traceable, and shareable, while still protecting confidential information and intellectual property where needed. A central part of this plan was the commitment to the FAIR principles: data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Importantly, “FAIR” does not automatically mean “open to everyone” – it means that the data can be properly managed and reused under the right access conditions.

To make this work in day-to-day research, NOVA established a shared digital infrastructure: the Data Exchange Platform (DEP), a secure platform based on OpenBIS. This platform was designed to store and organise a wide range of research outputs – from spreadsheets and numerical measurements to spectra, microscopy images, protocols, and technical reports – while also capturing the metadata (context information) needed to interpret the results correctly.

In the Update, NOVA moved from “plan” to “practice”. This update looked at how data management was actually happening across the consortium after two years of work. It mapped how data flowed between partners, and it assessed how well the DEP was being adopted. The update found that many partners were using a combination of systems (DEP, local servers, and cloud tools), and that while the DEP was widely valued, some teams experienced practical barriers – especially around uploading raw data and linking the right metadata. The Update therefore focused on identifying these obstacles and improving alignment, with the aim of strengthening collaboration and ensuring long-term sustainability of the project’s research outputs.

Overall, the documents show that NOVA treated data as a key project result in its own right. By building shared standards and a secure platform for exchange, NOVA helped ensure that experimental results from across Europe could be combined, compared, and used more efficiently – supporting the project’s wider goal of developing antimicrobial coatings that are not only effective, but also safe and sustainable across their life cycle.