There are about 40 initiatives on the European strategic
roadmap of research infrastructures (the ESFRI roadmap). The various
infrastructures address a wealth of different research topics. On the other
hand it is generally agreed that collaboration between the infrastructures is
beneficial for sharing of experiences, best practices and solutions to generic
problems ranging from management and legal topics to instrumentation and IT systems.
Without coordination inevitable fragmentation in adopted solutions will occur,
which again has negative effects in terms of cost-efficiency and
interoperability.
So how to enable collaboration of nearly 40 large
initiatives? A partial answer has been to divide them in thematic areas and
utilize this structure for joint discussions. In fact, there are four distinct
thematic cluster projects in operation for this purpose, funded by the European
Commission from the FP7 funding program. The thematic areas are Environmental
Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, Life Sciences, and Physics. These
projects have been able to act as intermediate layer both for interaction with
most ESFRI research infrastructures, and for finding synergies and common
solutions inside a thematic area. The individual research infrastructures, on
the other hand, can have their important topics better adopted within the
different stakeholders if they utilize the joint influence of the whole
cluster.
My own experience comes mainly from working in the cluster
project for Environmental sciences, the ENVRI project, and from
discussions from experienced people working in the other clusters. What the
cluster can be very good at is to bring people from different disciplines
together to discuss and share experiences. This should include also partners
specifically concentrating on development of IT or e-infrastructure services,
not only research infrastructure communities, to have best potential for new
developments. Additionally, the cluster projects can set priorities and feed in
requirements for service providers and policy-makers.
There is also a need for common IT services between the
infrastructures. In ENVRI, for example, there is development for integrated
data discovery tools, allowing researchers to conveniently find data from other
disciplines that can be very valuable for their research. Individual infrastructure
doesn’t often have motivation to develop such tools or services, as they are
naturally concentrating for their own specific services.
On the other hand, there is overhead in a cluster project
namely to overcome the barrier to understand each other’s language, and have
the persistence to make the effort of finding synergies. This has probably been
a challenge for all the ESFRI cluster projects but I think that all have been
able to overcome this hurdle. Another weak point of the cluster projects may be
the sustainability of the outcomes. The clusters are set up to benefit the
individual ESFRI initiatives, but how to make sure that the outcomes are
adopted by them. It will take an effort in any case for the infrastructures to
include new modules or software components into their operations.
Overall I think the benefits more than match the drawbacks
(speaking again mostly from the ENVRI perspective). Real development has taken
place and the outcomes have potential for wide impact through increased
connections between the fields. There even might be a sense of being part of a
larger community, which of course is a good sign towards further collaboration.
