Research infrastructures want a bigger role in FP10

Research infrastructures want to take on a broader remit in the next Framework Programme – and the draft calls for 2025 are starting to move them in this direction. 

Jose Luis Martinez, chair of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), sees the large scale advanced research facilities playing a key role in the EU quest to boost its global competitiveness using EU investments. 

“In the future Framework Programme, research infrastructures should be considered more transversal,” says Martinez. In Horizon Europe, they are limited to the Pillar I for excellent science. “But it’s more than that,” he says. “We can contribute a lot to many different areas.”

Research infrastructures provide much-needed knowledge and intelligence in areas such as environment and climate change. But security-related research, a big topic right now as wars and conflicts rage at the EU’s doorstep, is also within their capabilities, says Martinez.

Having a broader remit in the next Framework Programme, FP10, means funding would have to be rethought too. 

“We don’t speak about amounts or millions, it’s more philosophical,” Martinez says. He is hoping for openness to explore tapping resources from multiple parts of the EU budget, not just those managed by the European Commission’s directorate for research. “Why not also have some share of this budget coming from other areas? Because at the end, we are contributing to that.”

The push for more transversal funding chimes with the rumoured Commission plans to combine several EU funds into one mega-fund for competitiveness. 

Priorities for 2025

This week, Martinez is in Australia for the International Conference on Research Infrastructures (ICRI), where stakeholders from around the world are discussing internationalisation and greening of research infrastructures. 

Meanwhile the ESFRI roadmap, is currently on the lookout for new research infrastructures with which to collaborate. The roadmap, which is updated every four years, maps European infrastructures. There are currently 41 up and running and 20 in the making. Starting this year, environmental sustainability is going to be the third aspect against which they’ll be evaluated.

In parallel to this, the Horizon Europe 2025 work programme for research infrastructures will be released soon. Science|Business has had a chance to look at the draft calls, as set out in slides from the Horizon Europe Research Infrastructures programme committee meeting in November, which were sent to us by readers. 

The work programme outlines draft calls worth almost €400 million, including €64 million for infrastructure development, with €30 million for individual actions to consolidate the landscape. There’s another €16.5 million for the early phase implementation of the latest batch of ESFRI roadmap projects, as well as €10 million for training and upskilling technical staff.

Another €90 million will go towards exploring services for tackling EU priorities and frontier knowledge in support of health research, and accelerating the green transition and digital transformation. 

The largest sum, €140 million, will go to research into next generation tools and methods for research infrastructures. Topics include reducing the climate footprint of research infrastructures and building AI-generated digital twins for science. 

Martinez, who is not on the programme committee, did not comment on the proposed calls. But he is confident that the current programming of research infrastructure funding under Horizon Europe is setting a firm footing for FP10.

“In general, I will say that my feeling is that they try to connect the last three years of Horizon Europe with the future FP10,” he says. He warns this is speculative as plans for FP10 are not set, but the current discussions “go in the proper direction.”

Open science cloud 

One key project for  all the research infrastructures is the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), an EU endeavour to create a pan-European federated data sharing infrastructure for science. 

Horizon Europe will fund these efforts with €103 million next year, according to the leaked slides. There will be funding to develop skills needed for open science advancement and creating synergies with Common European Data Spaces, among others.

Martinez says the future of EOSC is an important question for research infrastructures, as they will provide a large chunk of the data populating the cloud, at least in the beginning. 

Making sure data is interoperable and sharable in the cloud is a difficult task, given the range of different organisations and observatories that will be taking part. For EOSC to function, its data must adhere to the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability.

“You need personnel with the proper skills to achieve this kind of interoperability and to make the data FAIR,” says Martinez. “These people are very difficult to find and especially very difficult to retain.”

At the same time, artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly important part of the puzzle. It could also be used to process the data and improve adherence to FAIR principles. In 2025, Horizon Europe will fund calls to advance AI-readiness in the EOSC ecosystem and using generative AI for scientific research via EOSC. 

This is only the beginning. “It certainly will be a priority, I imagine, for Framework Programme 10,” Martinez says.