CSC’s statement on EC public consultations on Horizon Europe Framework Programme

A strong research infrastructure foundation to support excellent research and innovation

CSC states that Europe must play a leading role in driving excellent research and innovation to tackle global grand challenges. This requires a strong research infrastructure (RI) foundation. A key role for RIs is to enable broad strategic R&I missions, where data intensive and cross-disciplinary research can reach its full potential.

CSC supports the Horizon Europe policy priorities: Protective, Competitive, Fair, Sustainable and Influential Europe. Research Infrastructures is a prerequisite for excellent research and innovation targeting all these priorities, clearly affecting the success of all of the pillars in Horizon Europe. RIs are becoming increasingly advanced and more expensive to develop, and sufficient funding must be directed to support RIs in pillar I "Excellent Science". Excellence should always be the main criterion for funding.

Promoting Open Science and developing the European Data economy

CSC strongly supports the principles of Open Science as the modus operandi of the Horizon Europe programme: the fostering of open access to research data and the support of FAIR principles, and the further development and consolidation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). CSC is happy to note that the use of existing RIs and following the FAIR principles is explicitly promoted in the RI section of Horizon Europe. However, more emphasis should be put on data interoperability and on the training and skills development aspect of Excellent Science, and the immense impact this could have for Europe. The possibility for RIs to become more engaged in addressing multi-layer interoperability issues should be better addressed.

Europe should actively fund, manage, and safeguard the increasing volume of data being generated by publicly funded research. By integrating and sustaining core data resources from research across Europe, member states enable data users in academia and industry to carry out research and innovation without unnecessary replication of experiments.

Horizon Europe must prioritise linking the two parts of the European Cloud Initiative: EOSC and the European Data Infrastructure (EDI), where EuroHPC JU is the main component. This is a crucial step towards building the European Data Economy.

Read the whole statement in here (pdf).