Towards a European Research Area with stronger research infrastructures, data management and open science
CSC strongly supports the EU’s goal to boost the performance of Europe’s research and innovation system with an ERA Act that incentivises RDI spending, better integration and coordination of national and EU-level efforts. CSC would like to stress the importance of strengthening research infrastructures and open science and research as enabling conditions for research and innovation that boost economic competitiveness and resilience.
Research infrastructures, in particular digital ones, are key enablers of cutting-edge research and innovation across all disciplines and sectors, providing a shared foundation that allows researchers and innovators to exchange data, methods, and expertise. They are also indispensable for developing and applying new technologies, strengthening Europe’s own technological capacity, European peoples’ skills and competencies and reducing critical dependencies. However, fragmentation across the current infrastructure landscape limits their ability to act as a unified driver for European competitiveness and security. It is thus critical to ensure consolidated and sustained funding for research infrastructures both nationally and at the EU level, with the latter focusing especially on bringing European added value by developing excellent, world-class infrastructures that can encourage researcher mobility and attract and retain talent. Also, fostering transnational, excellence-driven infrastructure access can support European research leadership and the “fifth freedom” of a single research area. In addition, the ERA Act should foster better coordination of the currently fragmented research infrastructure landscape and its stronger integration with other research policy goals and funding programmes, including Horizon Europe and the policy windows of the future Competitiveness Fund.
In the era of data-intensive research, Europe must ensure data capabilities. This means reinforcing European data infrastructures but also federating data resources across different infrastructures in Europe. The ERA Act should steer infrastructures to assure excellent data management, which requires skilled people, interoperability and reuse of research data, and access to common data infrastructures, e.g. the European Open Science Cloud, in line with the European Charter for Access to Research Infrastructures. Interoperability and other FAIR data practices are core components of scientific breakthroughs and business innovation achieved by pooling resources and forming cross-border ecosystems of interconnected research infrastructures and talent, as exemplified by theEuroHPC supercomputing framework and AI Factories within the digital infrastructure domain. In addition, European ownership of research data must be ensured through data policies and governance, to boost value creation for Europe from European data.
Research infrastructures have an important role in upholding and expanding open science and research – the open access to publications, results, and data. Open science and research bring substantial benefits to research and society, contributing to transparency and to high-quality research and innovation. Openness improves verifiability, lays ground for new insights and drives interdisciplinarity and collaboration. It increases efficiency and saves money, as sharing of data saves time. As such, it is in line with the ERA’s goal to create a single, borderless market for research, innovation and technology, and goes also beyond the role of research infrastructures. The ERA Act should therefore consistently promote open science and research. Given the increasingly challenging geopolitical context, when openness cannot be the default, the principle of “as open as possible, as restricted as necessary” should be applied.
The legislative act must improve the framework conditions for European research by steering the policy framework to strengthen research infrastructures and open science and research practices by e.g. setting minimum standards in data management. However, fully utilising the potential of infrastructures and open science and research requires strategic investments and upskilling across society. It is critical to create understanding of technology as a horizontal skillset in all domains. To build a solid competence base across the society, the possibilities, risks, applications and implications of technology in different fields of research, business and governance need to be considered.
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Irina Kupiainen
Irina Kupiainen is responsible for CSC’s Public Affairs.