Big science needs pan-European infrastructure and sharing of data

Hervé Pero, the European Commission’s head of unit for research infrastructures

The two main contenders are both large population studies looking for relationships between health, genes and environment, the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRI), and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).

Hervé Pero, the European Commission’s head of unit for research infrastructures, says both projects are drafting proposals to adopt the new legal identity, known as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), and he expects the final proposals to be put forward during the summer.

Nor are BBMRI and SHARE the only two research infrastructures considering adopting the ERIC status. According to Pero, around ten are weighing the possibility.

The idea behind the status is to enable ERICs to operate more like multinationals that have production and/or services facilities in different countries. The legal status, recognised by all EU member states, will give ERICs some of the advantages of international organisations, such as being exempt from value-added tax (VAT). “It’s a legal form that enables in particular the management of distributed research infrastructures in Europe,” Pero told Science|Business in an interview.

A research infrastructure financed by several EU countries inevitably involves one member state helping to build a facility in another member state and then having to pay VAT in that country, to the displeasure of national finance ministers. “This was blocking the situation for years,” Pero said. The possibility of adopting the ERIC status removes this bottleneck and creates a new way of managing world-class, cross-border research services, he said. “It provides much more freedom and flexibility.”

The BBMRI biobanking project, led by Austria, is currently rounding off its preparatory phase, which started in early 2008 money from Framework Programme 7. Important elements of this stage were for member states to sort out financial and administrative issues and agree on a governance and business plan.

The concept involves linking more than 400 biobanks in a distributed infrastructure, allowing researchers to have access to data from across Europe. Key concerns with this new way of managing national biobanks include donor anonymity and consent, whether the pharmaceutical industry should have the same access to these biobanks as academic researchers, who owns intellectual property rights of any products, such as diagnostics developed as a result, and how to enable individual nations to manage the cost of granting greater access to their data.

“It is always possible that some member states will not be convinced,” Pero said, adding “If three sign up, that’s already good, if 10 do, it’s better, and if we have all 27, then great. Evolution is the key word. We don’t want [a] revolution, even though I’m French,” he quipped.

SHARE, the healthy ageing infrastructure led by Germany, is not only gathering data from many countries but also from many disciplines, with the aim of delivering, “the full picture of the ageing process”. The data collected from more than 45,000 individuals aged 50 or over includes health variables such as health behaviour, use of health care facilities, indicators of physical fitness, such as grip strength and body-mass index; psychological variables such as mental health and life satisfaction; economic variables, including current work and opportunities to work past retirement age, and social support variables, for example assistance within families, transfers of income and assets.

“We want research infrastructures, including e-infrastructures, that encourage multi-disciplinarity,” Pero says. “We don’t want fragmentation, either country by country or topic by topic. The approach is to be as multi-disciplinary, multi-user as possible.”

Pero dismissed any suggestion that the ERIC status has proved unpopular given that one year on it hasn’t yet been adopted by anyone. “Member states don’t decide from one day to another. They need time for such big decisions, they must analyse the risk for, and against, adopting ERIC. They need to reflect upon all possible consequences before signing an agreement,” he said.

The ten considering the possibility are all part of the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) roadmap. This roadmap covers 44 infrastructures of pan-European interest that correspond to the long-term needs of the European research communities, covering all scientific areas, regardless of the possible location. The roadmap aims to ensure that a coherent vision of what research facilities Europe needs to compete with the likes of the US, China and Japan, Pero said.

ESFRI is in the process of updating its roadmap, with publication due at the end of the year. Some projects will disappear from the list, either because they have already been implemented or because the analysis shows it is not possible to implement them today as had been earlier foreseen, Pero said. Others will be added to the list. They will cover renewable and nuclear energy, systems biology and environment-related research infrastructures, he said, declining to go into more detail.

“Research infrastructures are a new way of managing things, an evolution, a third way,” Pero said. “We need to move away from the idea of the scientist in the ivory tower and towards recognising research infrastructures as a key part of a socio-economic, industrial and scientific ecosystem.”

Pero acknowledges that research infrastructures cannot solve all of society’s future challenges alone, but he is convinced that they can provide a crucial part of the solution.

For more information, visit: http://www.share-project.org.