A High-Level Expert Group recommends possible solutions to address the financial sustainability of Europe’s research infrastructures.
In June, the European Commission (EC) published a report on “Supporting the Transformative Impact of Research Infrastructures on European Research“, drafted by a High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) that was put in place by the EC’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) in January 2019. The report assesses the progress made by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and other world-class research infrastructures (RIs) towards implementation and long-term sustainability. The HLEG received the mandate to analyse “the effectiveness of the EU measures supporting the development of a well-balanced and competitive” RI system.
The HLEG concludes in its report that the RI system, that was promoted and supported by the EU, “has contributed to transforming the way science is done in Europe with an emphasis on collaboration, inclusiveness and open, merit-based access to world-class infrastructures across the research landscape”. Thus, RIs play a major part in enabling the research community’s discoveries, technology development and therefore pushing forward innovation and competitiveness. Therefore, it is key to evaluate the effectiveness of the investments in promoting and operating RIs and identifying solutions for their long-term sustainability (LTS).
While the funding instruments have been very effective in supporting the ‘bottom-up’ stages of RI lifecycles, the report recalled that “issues of misalignment of national roadmap exercises and funding plans for RIs need to be overcome to make the implementation of the full RI system supporting the European Research Area (ERA) more time efficient and cost-effective”. The report notes that LTS continues to be a challenge for the “vast majority of RI’s”, even though LTS itself is increasingly emphasised in EU funding instrument calls: “We find that few RIs outside the European Intergovernmental Research Organisation forum (EIROforum) grouping are able to demonstrate the characteristics required to achieve long-term sustainability”. Furthermore, the HLEG observed that “unique research infrastructures are also operated by networks and that the full deployment of competitive research services in Europe cannot be pursued by implementing an ever-growing number of autonomous legal RI entities”.
The HLEG concludes that future Horizon Europe funding instruments should address LTS early on in a RI lifecycle. The report recommends that this could be best achieved by a “staged approach” with funding targeted at defined lifecycle stages or readiness levels that include checkpoints to verify progress. Furthermore, the EC should consider to set up a panel of independent experts in collaboration with the ESFRI “to assess and verify progress at the end of each FP-funded grant or contract and to recommend future actions”. The report also states that the fact alone that an RI is on the ESFRI roadmap “should not lead to an automatic expectation of financial support from the EU”. RIs should rather fulfil certain criteria and show progress before applying for the next round of funding support.
Given the importance of sustainable funding, the report proposes that in order to “allow for more effective proposal reviews, a ‘dossier’ for each RI should be created tracking its funding history and successful achievement of its own goals against its schedule”. Furthermore, the HLEG suggests that the EU should try to improve long-term sustainability by insisting “on Member States’ contributions to the funding of Preparatory and Implementation Phases”. Moreover, the report finds that the requirement on RIs to align and contribute to the definition of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) services and operational instruments “requires a higher level of coherence in the funding from different chapters (DG RTD, DG CONNECT) of the Framework Programme, and across the three pillars of Horizon Europe”.
The report recognises that the “RI system has a structuring effect for the ERA”, but at the same time “more effort is needed in order to coordinate investments in research and to facilitate the use of RI services across all scientific fields”. While the HLEG’s analysis of the European RI landscape showed many challenges in terms of sustainability, it also arrives at encouraging conclusions: “Overall, the European RI system is delivering excellent science, with many examples of absolute international leadership.”