Connecting research infrastructures and a wider user community across the European Research Area through access to advanced research infrastructure services

Expected Outcome

Project results are expected to contribute to all the following expected outcomes:

• Better connection of research infrastructures across the European Research Area reinforcing and spreading excellence throughout the European Research Area;
• mitigating scattered national and regional research infrastructures and pockets of scientific excellence, and increasing the circulation of knowledge;
• wider, simplified, and more efficient access to the best research infrastructures available to researchers to conduct curiosity-driven excellent research, irrespective of location;
• breakthrough and leading-edge research enabled by advanced research infrastructure services made available to a wider user community;
• enhanced integration of a wider user community in the European research infrastructure ecosystem; enhanced capacities of a wider user community to address research challenges and EU policy priorities; enhanced convergence of research capacities and increase of Europe’s competitiveness;
• a new generation of researchers trained to optimally exploit all the essential tools for their research; better management, including implementing FAIR data principle, of the continuous flow of data collected or produced by research infrastructures.

Scope

The topic targets the further integration of a wider user community in the European RI ecosystem and the strengthening of this ecosystem across the entire European Research Area through access to research infrastructures and other activities. The proposed action should provide trans-national access (on-site or remote) and/or virtual access to services offered by a set of similar or complementary advanced national or pan-European research infrastructures, to enable curiosity-driven excellent interdisciplinary research. Proposals should adhere to the guidelines and principles of the European Charter for Access to Research Infrastructures[https://op.europa.eu/publication-detail/-/publication/ec4692ae-ac6f-11ef-acb1-01aa75ed71a1. Research infrastructures or laboratories from across the European Research Area should be consortium members and contribute to the offering of transnational access to services. Financial support to third parties may be used to extend the portfolio of services from access providers that are not beneficiaries, provided that the beneficiaries ensure that the conditions and requirements relating to access provisions as given in the “Specific features for Research Infrastructures” are fulfilled. Transnational access activities should be designed to stimulate excellence and impact and enhance convergence of research skills and capacities throughout Europe, with due attention to early-stage researchers.

Proposals should address all the following aspects:

• Availability to researchers of a broad portfolio of research infrastructure services, including research infrastructures financed from funds under Union Cohesion Policy, which are relevant for frontier research in the chosen scientific area, including data services; all of the transnational access provisions should be led by the target of enhancing integration of a wider community in the European RI ecosystem;
• Bi-directional exchanges within a wide user community of researchers/research groups across the European Research Area, including also networking activities, all of which potentially leading to longer term collaboration (including short-term exchange programmes, favouring direct interaction over online interaction);
• Pro-active outreach measures to increase awareness about research infrastructure services among researchers in targeted countries; Activities targeting specifically early-stage researchers.

In the case of financial support to third parties (FSTP), the relevant conditions and requirements of the “Specific features for research infrastructures” of this work programme should be included in the FSTP calls and the applicants to the FSTP open calls, should be the third party research infrastructures demanded by user-group(s). In the case of transnational access, the beneficiaries select the user-groups according to the conditions and requirements of the “specific features for research infrastructures” section of this work programme, with the above mentioned further condition. The beneficiaries ensure that the access provider selected through the FSTP calls is a state-of-the-art research infrastructure, and that it will provide appropriate documentation to support and justify the amount of access provided and the information on the users as specified in the “specific features for research infrastructures” section of this work programme. To simplify the selection process, proposals under this topic may combine the calls inviting researchers to apply for transnational access and the FSTP calls so that a one stage selection procedure can be implemented based on a joint application from the user group submitting the ‘user project’ and the needed third party access provider. The recipient of the financial support is the third party research infrastructure that is providing access to the selected user-group(s). The financial support should cover the costs incurred by the third party to provide access (actual costs, unit costs, or a combination of the two) plus any work for service customisation as well as the travel and subsistence of users if visits are needed to use the infrastructures. Alternatively, proposals may opt for centrally managed travel and or subsistence costs for all or part of the selected user projects. In such case, these costs are excluded from the concerned FSTP.

Data management (and related ethics issues), interoperability, as well as the connection of digital services (e.g. data services) to the European Open Science Cloud, should be addressed where relevant. Proposals should consider major European or international initiatives relevant in the domain. Whenever appropriate, they should foster the use and deployment of (open) global standards. Proposals are expected to exploit synergies and to ensure complementarity and coherence with other EU grants supporting access provision. Proposals should include the list of services/installations[1] made available by the action for transnational or virtual access and the amounts of units of access made available for users. Further conditions and requirements relating to access provisions that applicants should fulfil when drafting a proposal are given in the “Specific features for Research Infrastructures” section of this work programme part. Compliance with these provisions will be taken into account during evaluation.

Proposals could consider the inclusion of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) research infrastructures offering access to external users, that facilitates access and provides training and capacity building to users from user institutions in the European Research Area. In that respect, the JRC will consider collaborating with any successful proposal and this collaboration, when relevant, should be established after the proposal’s approval.

[1] “Installation” means a part or a service of a research infrastructure that can be used independently from the rest. A research infrastructure consists of one or more installations.