More coordination?

Research infrastructures are acknowledged as having key importance for competitiveness and renewal of economy by enabling research breakthroughs and new innovations. Accordingly there are many ongoing national and international activities aiming to support construction, development and operation of Research infrastructures. At the same time strong need for prioritization between RIs is necessary as public funding is limited.

To tackle some of these questions nationally, a research infrastructure expert group has been established at the Academy of Finland (so called FIRI group). The FIRI group for example coordinates ongoing update of Finnish Research Infrastructure Roadmap, for which proposals were invited in early 2013.

This week the expert group organized a seminar on current state and future of RIs (presentations on Academy web site, in Finnish), discussing national RI policy as well as experiences drawn from planning and implementing certain emerging RIs. The discussion in the seminar stayed pretty well in topics of common interest (instead of lobbying for individual projects). Often mentioned topic was that how the different Research infrastructures can better collaborate and coordinate their actions. This is also a cost-efficiency question: the more RIs can share experiences, processes, platforms, tools etc., the higher impact RI funding has.

How to support this collaboration and coordination then? Simple answer is to increase discussion between people working on similar tasks at different initiatives. There are many organizational and legal issues, for example, that RIs are facing, such as joining officially an international governing body of the infrastructure; or preparing data policies safeguarding openness of research and possible requirements of funding partners.

Obviously, the commonalities extend to IT platforms as well. Most RIs require services for reliably storing, distributing and analyzing research data. Also identifying users and managing their authorizations to access the services or resources is a common need. IT solutions for such needs can often be generic. IT platforms do not make difference between bits representing particle physics information from bits representing genomics information.

Finland is relatively small country, which makes coordination achievable as long as there is willingness to share information. This is also what CSC aims to facilitate and encourage. Not only by developing excellent IT solutions, but seeking collaborations and promoting best practices. Not to mention representing Finnish stakeholders actively in international forum. In any case, regardless of structures and good intentions, collaboration is about people willing to share their knowledge and experiences with others.