New ESFRI scientitic infrastructure plan launched with stricter rules and more realistic agenda

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) today announced it is adding six new research facilities to its road map.

Forum chair John Womersley announced the new centres, which will focus on plant phenotyping; aerosols, clouds and trace gases; heritage science; a solar telescope; an underwater neutrino telescope; and studies on river-deltas, at a conference in the Netherlands.

These six centres join 15 other facilities on the route from drawing-board to construction site and represent a smaller, more realistic agenda than presented by the forum in previous years.

“It’s a different economic climate from the last roadmap in 2010,” Womersley told Science|Business. “Understandably, there was reluctance to keep adding new projects.”

The purpose of ESFRI, which was started in 2006, is to keep a running list of proposed scientific infrastructure projects in search of funding, covering all scientific areas, regardless of location. While it does not distribute money, the forum’s imprimatur puts a fledgling infrastructure on a firm political footing.

EU governments in 2014 mandated the forum to complete its first update in six years with a thinned out agenda.

As well as a more manageable number of projects on the road map – today there are 21, down from a peak of 48 – there are also stricter rules for participating projects.

“We are now setting them more work to do at the very beginning,” said Womersley, who is also chief executive officer of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council.

From now on there will be an upfront requirement for projects to get the backing of at least three of the 41 forum member states.

Projects must also commit to going operational within ten years. If they fail, they have to drop out and re-submit.  “This actually happened already. The neutrino telescope had to re-submit after losing the support of Greece, said Womersley. This is understandable, given the state of the country’s finances, he added.

Evaluators working on behalf of the forum will also place more emphasis on project maturity, which means scientists will have to detail where they expect funding to come from.

“Projects with good ideas need to understand they carry the risk of not materialising if they don’t think of financing earlier. We didn’t emphasise this enough in the past. It was hit and miss with some projects,” Womersley said.

However, he is clear that the new rules do not present an additional obstacle to building new facilities. “These are hurdles they’d have to clear anyway. The only difference now is they have to confront these questions earlier.”

With Horizon 2020 support for research infrastructures being limited, most of the early budget for these projects has to come directly from governments.

The next roadmap update is expected to be in 2018.