Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RISCAPE (European Research Infrastructures in the International Landscape)

Teaser

ESFRI Research infrastructures are major investments from the Member states supporting key research areas with shared common resources. They represent facilities, services and data provides crucial to science, technical development, answering to societal and technical...

Summary

ESFRI Research infrastructures are major investments from the Member states supporting key research areas with shared common resources. They represent facilities, services and data provides crucial to science, technical development, answering to societal and technical challenges and are the key to leading global position of the European Research Area.

In recent times, the European landscape of the research infrastructures have been extensively investigated by both MERIL(1 and 2) H2020 projects, and by ESFRI themselves. However, there is a strong need for international landscape analysis: finding out which are the main respective facilities and infrastructures around the world; how we can create better interaction with them, develop together, share resources, and plan complementarities and shared access policies.

The objective of the RISCAPE is to provide systematic, focused, high quality, comprehensive, consistent and peer-reviewed international landscape analysis report on the position and complementarities of the major European research infrastructures in the international research infrastructure landscape. To achieve this, RISCAPE will:
a. Establish a close links with a stakeholder panel representing the main user groups of the report, including representatives from ESFRI, the OECD and Member state funding agencies to ensure usability and the focus of the Report;
b. Use close co-operation with other projects and initiatives in the European research infrastructures development to ensure consistency with the existing landscape work. Particularly, RISCAPE builds on the European Research Infrastructures (RIs) in the ESFRI landscape report (2016) and on the landscape analysis done or currently underway in the H2020 cluster projects;
c. Leverage the experts on the European RIs with extensive knowledge on the disciplines involved and RI development in Europe. The RISCAPE project benefits from the contacts and tools developed in the cluster- and international RI collaboration projects to maximize the discipline-specific usability of the results. The key factor in the RISCAPE analysis is that the complementarities will be analyzed in a way which is natural and suitable for the discipline and RI in question;
d. The resulting Report and the used methods will be independently peer reviewed to maximize the usability and objectivity of the information provided for the EU strategic RI development and policy.
These objectives answer directly to the European Commission strategy on EU international cooperation in research and innovation, particularly on the need to obtain objective information in order to help implement the (EC) strategic approach.

Work performed

As the most of the RISCAPE activities are delivered in the end of the project, the first reporting period concentrated on some of the main development, planning, and initialization activities. Thus, the main subobjectives of the period are (with their success rate):

1) Develop a working version of the RISCAPE methodology to use in the European and in the International engagement and information collection. This activity was successful and documented in the RISCAPE methodology deliverable. However, the development activity took longer as planned, partially due to delayed start of the WP2. Also notably, the peer review of these methods did not happen as planned as the peer review panel founding was delayed. This is explained in WP1 report.
2) The Stakeholder panel is selected and formed, and they have given their commentary on the methods, plans and development of the RISCAPE report. This activity was fully successful, and reported in WP1 report.
3) Each disciplinary WP (3-10) engage their respective ESFRI and other major RIs in Europe to collect potential international RIs to be analyzed. This activity is reported in the WP 3-10 reports and was generally successful, although some of the WPs had difficulties to collect the information in the original timing.
4) Each disciplinary WP (3-10) contact the international RIs and collect the information needed for the RISCAPE report. This activity is reported in the WP descriptions, and is approximately 4 months delayed due to delays in the methodology development. However, the activity is well in the way, and the delay will be covered by stronger commitment in the last part of Y2 and by moving some of the activites in early Y3 (slightly moving some of the report integration towards later part of Y3).
5) Dissemination activites are prepared for the RISCAPE report dissemination. This activity was successful.
6) Project internal communications are done, along with necessary reports (DMP). – successful activity.
7) Strategic collaboration activities started with international and European projects and initiatives on research infrastructure landscapes. – successful.

Final results

The methodology of the RISCAPE project provides a more consistent approach to research infrastructure landscape efforts. It is based on wide literature analysis, stakeholder need mapping and best practices of data collection. As the organisations and facilities providing research infrastructure - like services differ widely internationally, the RISCAPE is based on individual interviews, where the interview questions are aimed towards gaining a holistic understanding on the organisation capabilities, goals and services. The overall methodology is targeted on collecting consistent information on the research infrastructures broadly based on following categories:
1) general information, contacts, etc. 2) Does the organisation fit on the RISCAPE definition of an Research Infrastructure (based on longevity, scale of operations - impact, science-orientation? 3) services provided to researchers, access policies, 4) interdependencies, 5) potential collaboration opportunities. The results are stored in a common platform and are agreed with the respondent.

A second major achievement of the project this far has been collection of a consistent idea of existing connections of ESFRI RIs to international RIs and a potential list of future collaboration targets. This evaluation is the basis of the interview targets and is naturally evolving as the project matures, but already shows major trends. However, there seems to be difficulty to gain information on some areas of the world, particularly on Latin America, Africa and SE Asia, which can indicate a) lack of major research infrastructures, b) lack of connections to existing infrastructures (and thus not known in the analysis this far). Evaluation of this is underway and can differ significantly on area of question. The analysis has also shown the difficulty of effectively define research infrastructures, especially in countries where the term is not used, or used only in specific contexts.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.riscape.eu.