  As scientific discovery becomes increasingly data-driven, software platforms
are needed to efficiently organize and disseminate data from disparate sources.
This is certainly the case in the field of materials science. For example,
Materials Project has generated computational data on over 60,000 chemical
compounds and has made that data available through a web portal and REST
interface. However, such portals must seek to incorporate community submissions
to expand the scope of scientific data sharing. In this paper, we describe
MPContribs, a computing/software infrastructure to integrate and organize
contributions of simulated or measured materials data from users. Our solution
supports complex submissions and provides interfaces that allow contributors to
share analyses and graphs. A RESTful API exposes mechanisms for book-keeping,
retrieval and aggregation of submitted entries, as well as persistent URIs or
DOIs that can be used to reference the data in publications. Our approach
isolates contributed data from a host project's quality-controlled core data
and yet enables analyses across the entire dataset, programmatically or through
customized web apps. We expect the developed framework to enhance collaborative
determination of material properties and to maximize the impact of each
contributor's dataset. In the long-term, MPContribs seeks to make Materials
Project an institutional, and thus community-wide, memory for computational and
experimental materials science.
