Electrochemical energy storage is central to modern society -- from consumer electronics to electrified transportation and the power grid. It is no longer just a convenience but a critical enabler of the transition to a resilient, low-carbon economy. The large pluralistic battery research and development community serving these needs has evolved into diverse specialties spanning materials discovery, battery chemistry, design innovation, scale-up, manufacturing and deployment. Despite the maturity and the impact of battery science and technology, the data and software practices among these disparate groups are far behind the state-of-the-art in other fields (e.g. drug discovery), which have enjoyed significant increases in the rate of innovation. Incremental performance gains and lost research productivity, which are the consequences, retard innovation and societal progress. Examples span every field of battery research , from the slow and iterative nature of materials discovery, to the repeated and time-consuming performance testing of cells and the mitigation of degradation and failures. The fundamental issue is that modern data science methods require large amounts of data and the battery community lacks the requisite scalable, standardized data hubs required for immediate use of these approaches. Lack of uniform data practices is a central barrier to the scale problem. In this perspective we identify the data- and software-sharing gaps and propose the unifying principles and tools needed to build a robust community of data hubs, which provide flexible sharing formats to address diverse needs. The Battery Data Genome is offered as a data-centric initiative that will enable the transformative acceleration of battery science and technology, and will ultimately serve as a catalyst to revolutionize our approach to innovation.
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