Research Infrastructures in Europe – Development, Sustainability and Inclusion

Wednesday, 18 September 2024

Venue: Research Centre for Natural Sciences, 1117 Budapest, Magyar Tudósok Körútja 2

10:00 – 18:00 CEST

The future competitiveness of the European Research Area in science and technology is predicated upon the ERA having a Research Infrastructure (RI) based on facilities and people.  Modern science and technology require access to state-of-the-art facilities, both large (e.g. synchrotrons, accelerators)  and medium/small (e.g. suites of analytical tools). These may be based in custom-built sites, on the premises of universities, or at national institutes. Facilities are not restricted to laboratories but also embrace field-sites, computational and data bases/archives with both on-site or virtual access. 

Europe has built up a complex, multidisciplinary set of RIs that support a myriad of science and technology embracing all fields, such that European Researchers and European industry are able to act at the forefront of modern research with examples including AI and machine learning, astronomy, climate change, nanotechnology, next-generation health care and quantum computing. Uniquely, the majority of these facilities are open to all European researchers at no cost to the user. Hence, we have been able to exploit the full intellectual capacity of ERA home to over 2 million researchers.

RIs may be single-site in Europe or internationally (e.g. CERN or European Southern Observatory (ESO)),  or ‘Distributed’ across many sites and nation states e.g. European Synchrotron network. However, such a RI has grown largely organically with access funding often relying upon direct Funding from the EC Framework programmes. Future funding and models for the sustaining of ERA RIs are now in question and alternative structural and funding models for the ERA RI network are being developed ranging from the 29 European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERICs) often led by governmental organisations to growing numbers of Associations internationale sans but lucrative (AISBLs) commonly organised and led by the community of academics and institutions. One size and structure does not fit all, and the operability and sustainability of ERA RIs are and will be necessarily varied. However, discussions between different RIs to share operational models and examples of good practice are required.

This one-day meeting is arranged to directly follow the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) meeting held in Szeged, Hungary, 16-17 September 2024. The meeting is open to all ERA RIs and builds upon the recently published ESFRI landscape analysis of ERA RIs. The meeting is focused upon two specific topics:

1. Models of ERA RIs and their sustainability.
2. Widening participation in ERA RIs. 

Programme

10.00 to 12.00: Networking and discussion.

12.00 Lunch 

13.00 Opening

13.15 Session 1 Keynotes

1. The ERIC landscape
2. The AISBL Landscape
3. Distributed RIs – Definition and practice
4. RI Sustainability models and practice.

14.30 Session 1 Panel and Open Forum

15:30 Coffee Break

16.00 Keynotes

1. EU RI landscape – Geographical Distribution
2. CERIC – An initiative to for distributed infrastructure in physics
3. In-kind potential to large scale infrastructures – possibilities and limitations
4. Training and retaining RI staff.

17.15 Panel and Open Forum.      

Session 1. Models of ERA RIs and their Sustainability

The EU research infrastructure community remains poorly connected and acts in many disparate ways. It is thus often hard for agencies and governmental organisations to understand and navigate the EU RI landscape. In this session we will review the different  types of ERA RIs, their structure  (and the advantages and disadvantages of each). We will aim to characterize some of the terms widely used (but with different definitions in different communities)  such as ‘Distributed Research Infrastructures’, discuss how ERA RIs may work more closely together to optimise their functionality (many facilities are in more than one RI with each RI  operating different management and access provisions) and increase their visibility and impact to disparate user communities (including industry). Different models for long-term sustainability of RIs will be discussed and debated.  Finally, the provision for cooperation and information exchange between ERA RIs will be discussed with the option of hosting biannual meetings

Session 2. 2.   Widening Participation in ERA RIs

The vast majority of ERA RIs draw upon facilities based in a limited number of countries. To date, there are fewer facilities and thus less institutional membership of RIs from the nation-states in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe. In this session we aim to review this landscape and explore both the potential and the challenges for facilities and RIs in these regions. This discussion is topical for both the Hungarian Presidency (2024) and Polish Presidency (2025).The discussion aims to identify those initiatives that are present in the region that help the connection of the EU-15 and EU-13 countries’ researchers through the domestic research infrastructures. These infrastructures are playing a pivotal role in enabling researchers to use the scale-up facilities that are present mostly in the EU-15 (with the exception of the one ELI ERIC). Also, the national infrastructures are nodes of many distributed research infrastructures, and as such they can contribute to economic development as well either through their own development or through in-kind contributions to the large-scale research infrastructures.

Venue:

The Venue is close to the ELTe Department of Atomic Physics and the Department of Geophysics and Space.

The nearest hotel to the venue is the Radisson Hotel Budapest BudaPart (1117 Budapest, Dombóvári út 25 A). A range of more affordable hotels are available over the river, with self-catering apartments available near the venue bookable through Booking.com.

Organising Committee

Professor N J Mason, Atomki and Europlanet
Zsolt Fülöp, HUN-REN Atomki
Dr Szabó István, HUN-REN