Roadmap for research infrastructures

What is a roadmap for research infrastructures?

Finland’s national roadmap for research infrastructures is a plan drawn up for new national-level research infrastructures needed within the next 10–15 years, or national research infrastructures under construction, or for major renewal of existing research infrastructures. The roadmap will also include Finnish participation in new international infrastructure projects as well as major renewal or extension of projects involving international collaboration. In addition, the roadmap will cover the existing memberships in international research infrastructures and important national research infrastructures.

Bringing the research infrastructure roadmap up to date will provide information on projects that should remain or be included in the national roadmap for research infrastructures. The field of national research infrastructures has, in many respects, become more clarified since the drawing up of the previous roadmap in 2009. It is therefore necessary to compile a new roadmap to replace the old one.

• Research infrastructures constitute a reserve of research facilities, equipment, materials and services facilitating research and development at different stages of innovation, supporting organised research and development, researcher training and teaching at universities, and maintaining and developing research and innovation capacity.

A single-sited research infrastructure is appropriate in fields requiring major investments in expensive research equipment.

A distributed research infrastructure is suited to fields in which available resources are geographically dispersed.

Virtual research infrastructures are, for example, databases, archives, etc. that can be used by researchers from their own workstations.

For more information on the criteria for research infrastructures, see National-level research infrastructures – Present state and roadmap, (p. 22).

Roadmap update: Background

Finland’s first national roadmap for research infrastructures was completed in 2009 (National-level research infrastructures – Present state and roadmap, Ministry of Education 2009), including

• 24 existing national infrastructures
• 10 large-scale existing international infrastructures, in which Finland is a member
• 7 other international infrastructures, in which Finland participates
• 19 research infrastructures selected to be included in the roadmap; 13 of these represented research infrastructures included in the ESFRI roadmap (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures)
• 13 national or international proposals that were regarded to have potential to evolve into national infrastructures.

The roadmap for Finnish research infrastructures is only some four years old but is, nevertheless, already outdated in many respects. This is a consequence of rapid European and national developments. The European roadmap (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, ESFRI) was revised for the third time in 2010. The ESFRI has had both steering and constructive impacts on the structures of national research infrastructures. Increasingly more fields have experienced national networking, distribution of work and adaptation of new operating models in research infrastructures and their services. The technological development and a better identification of new global challenges in EU science policy have directed the development of research infrastructures. Another need for updating stems from the fact that the preparation of ESFRI research infrastructures involved in the national roadmap has now proceeded to a stage that requires long-term commitment to pay membership contributions and to build and maintain national infrastructures. The building and maintenance of national research infrastructures requires long-term commitment by the host organisations and other funding bodies.

As a consequence of national and international developments, the 2009 research infrastructure roadmap is in urgent need of updating. The present state of the national research infrastructures listed in the 2009 report, the progress of the 19 infrastructure projects and the present state of the 13 developing research infrastructures must be brought up to date. The 2013 report will replace the old roadmap. Existing or new research infrastructure projects can be included in the new roadmap only on the basis of submitted project proposals. However, no project proposals will be needed to update data on major international research infrastructures (CERN, EMBL, ESA, ESFR, ESO, FAIR, ITER) based on treaties.

The national broad-based expert group for research infrastructures (FIRI Committee) appointed by the Academy of Finland has been charged with the task of updating the national roadmap for research infrastructures in 2013. Another task of the FIRI Committee is to evaluate the urgency of the projects and to make proposals for prioritisation, implementation and funding. In its work to update the roadmap, the Committee will follow the same criteria for research infrastructures as in the 2009 roadmap. However, in the evaluation of the proposals, more focus will be placed on the following aspects:

• importance to Finnish scientific community
• scope of user community
• need for funding in the coming years
• commitment by funding bodies.

However, the update of the present state of and the roadmap for research infrastructures is not a funding application but, in addition of prioritisation, it will produce extensive background information for the basis of funding decisions to be made at a later stage.