Tenerife Declaration to foster global dimension and sustainability of Research Infrastructures signed, calling to enhance international cooperation based on European key principles and values.
On 25-26 September 2023, the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union organised a conference on the Global Dimension and Sustainability of Research Infrastructures, which was initiated with a visit to the Teide Observatory.
During the conference, it was underscored that Research Infrastructures (RIs) are a key pillar of excellent research and innovation and will remain a priority under the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU during the first half of 2024. The upcoming presidency already announced that a conference on research infrastructure will be organised in Brussels in June 2024, addressing issues such as funding and greening of RIs, their governance and the needed skills development.
The conference’s climax was the launch of the Tenerife Declaration on ‘Global Dimension and Sustainability of Research Infrastructures’. The signatories, under the auspices of the Spanish Presidency, call in the declaration to ensure the long-term sustainability of RIs, fostering career developments and skills in R&I, including Open Science and Artificial Intelligence, and to advance in Open Science policies and practices in RI, mainly through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and implementing the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable data) principles. Besides, there is a call for assessing the current challenges in the environment with an impact on RIs while promoting mutual learning in the search for solutions to shared problems and taking the opportunity to increase resilience. Other actions indicated are to increase the availability of critical raw materials and components to address the challenges identified in the third report on the ERIC Regulation.
Regarding the effort to enhance international cooperation, leading to ’Global RIs’, and fostering the role of RIs in advancing science diplomacy, the declaration highlights that it should be based on European key principles and values, especially when tackling issues such as academic freedom, research ethics and integrity, reciprocity, gender equality, and foreign interference while striving for excellence.
During the conference, ESFRI, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) also announced that it has established a group that is currently assessing the resources and instruments needed for RIs as well as the combination of available resources. The need to do an assessment on the financial sustainability of RIs was again mentioned in the 2nd ESFRI Stakeholders Forum Meetup in Tenerife on 27 September 2023. Jana Kolar, current ESFRI Chair, concluded the Forum, indicating that ESFRI was established 21 years ago and gave home to a flourishing system of RIs on the European levels. She also said that it is time to look back and to see how those RIs can be best used for European competitiveness, and to deliver the best services to different users, including industry. She also announced that from 2024, José Luis Martinez of the Higher Research Council (CSIC) in Spain will be the upcoming ESFRI Chair.
Moreover, in Tenerife, it was also highlighted that advancements of EOSC not only depend on the EU level, but also on the national and institutional levels as well as on a change of culture in the long term, which is interlinked with the currently ongoing process of reforming research assessment under the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (COARA) linked with the European Research Area Policy Agenda 2022-2024, concretely under ERA Action 3 as well as the ERA Action 4 to promote sustainable research careers. Previously, in the third EOSC Stakeholder Meeting organised from 20-22 September 2023, it was also stressed that EOSC is closely linked to other initiatives such as the European Data Spaces and the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDICS).