Support to the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures

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

• enhanced efficiency, impact and visibility of ESFRI strategy and actions;
• better structured and strengthened European research infrastructure ecosystem;
• reinforced global competitiveness of the European Research Area;
• coordination and alignment of EU and national priorities for research infrastructures;
• impact assessment of ESFRI.

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) brings together policy makers, funding bodies, and the scientific community to identify joint investment priorities for pan-European research infrastructures as well as to foster their implementation, sustainability and impact. A comprehensive and efficient support structure is essential for the effective execution of ESFRI's tasks and activities.

In this respect, the project should provide administrative support to the ESFRI Chair and the ESFRI Executive Board, and in particular, it should support ESFRI, the ESFRI working groups and other ESFRI bodies in carrying out all of the following activities:

• development and publishing of the ESFRI Roadmap and Landscape Analysis;
• effective evaluation of new ESFRI Roadmap applications and ESFRI project monitoring after 2026, using also external expertise;
• strengthening ESFRI’s analytical capacity, including through the use of external expertise in support of ESFRI policy and the ESFRI Roadmap processes;
• effective evaluation and monitoring of research infrastructures on the ESFRI Roadmap through appropriate ICT and analytical tools, using also external expertise;
• development and implementation of the ESFRI communication and outreach strategy, including organisation of ESFRI-led conferences and outreach events;
• fostering cooperation, exchange of experiences and good practices between the research infrastructures, their managers and stakeholders, as well as the funding bodies, including managing authorities of Cohesion policy programmes and policy makers;
• ensuring cooperation of ESFRI with ERA related groups and initiatives, with the EOSC initiative as well as with any other relevant initiatives, bodies and stakeholders at European or international level, including via the ESFRI Stakeholder Forum;
• calling on third party/ies to carry out an impact assessment of ESFRI taking account of suitable indicators proposed by ESFRI.

The project should organise its workplan in a sufficiently flexible way so as to be able to adapt to changing support needs of ESFRI. A mechanism with ESFRI should be foreseen to ensure optimal adaptation to ESFRI’s needs over the course of the project.

All software developed under this destination should be open source, licensed under a CC0 public domain dedication or under an open source licence as recommended by the Free Software Foundation^[1] and the Open Source Initiative^[2].

Proposals could consider the inclusion of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) Support Services Directorate in their research infrastructure portfolio. The JRC offers its experience in assessing, setting the strategy, maintaining, operating and providing access to external researchers to its research infrastructures in various fields of science. The JRC is an ESFRI stakeholder and collaborates with several ESFRI/ERIC consortia as an associated partner. In this regard, the JRC will consider collaborating with any successful proposal.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#SoftwareLicenses

[2] https://opensource.org/licenses