What are Research Infrastructures?

In brief, Research Infrastructures can be defined as facilities, resources and related services used by the scientific community to conduct research  (see for example definition by the European Commission). Using the term research infrastructure, or shorter, RI for a facility or a resource implies also that it is accessible for wider scientific community to conduct research. Research Infrastructures also tend to be large so that it is not practical for a single department or university to fund and operate a RI without joining forces with other organizations. The users and contributors of an RI form a user community of the infrastructure.

Some common and well-known examples of major research infrastructures are CERN – European organization for Nuclear Research and ESO – European Southern Observatory. Often RIs are not centralized as the previous examples, but they are distributed and/or virtual. A distributed RI is for example a network of measurement stations – as in ICOS, which monitors greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through a wide network of stations as well as data collections. Virtual RIs are, for example, databases or archives that are used remotely from users’ workstations.

Additionally, often-used term together with Research Infrastructures is e-Infrastructure. This is used to describe IT infrastructures that very often are key components of the RIs: computing and storage platforms, networks, software and applications. There are also e-Infrastructures that are RIs in their own right. For example PRACE – the European high-performance computing infrastructure coordinates access to European top computing resources.

Establishing and operating Research Infrastructures is a large effort that requires wide collaboration and expertise from various areas from engineering to scientific topics, and from computer science to management and law. There needs to be common access policy for the RI, for example, and common understanding how the costs of the infrastructure are shared.

Modern Research Infrastructures are essential for novel and groundbreaking research aiming to solve grand challenges of society and understanding the universe around us. It is certainly worthwhile to join the effort of building these instruments of science, working together with the research communities. There are many challenges ahead – but also great rewards.