4.1. Developing the European research infrastructures for 2020 and beyond

The aim is to facilitate and support the preparation, implementation, long-term sustainability and efficient operation of the research infrastructures identified by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and of other world-class research infrastructures, which will help Europe to respond to grand challenges in science, industry and society. This objective will address specifically those infrastructures that are planning to set up, are setting up or have set up their governance, e.g. on the basis of the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) or any equivalent structure at European or international level. The Union funding will contribute to, as appropriate: he preparatory phase of future infrastructures (e.g. detailed construction plans, legal arrangements, multiannual planning, and early engagement of industry); the implementation phase (e.g. research and development (R&D) and engineering work jointly with industry and users, and development of Regional Partner Facilities A Regional Partner Facility (RPF) is a research infrastructure of national or regional importance in terms of socio-economic returns, training and attracting researchers and technicians, that is recognised as a partner to a pan-European ESFRI or other world-class research infrastructure. The quality of the RPF, including the level of its scientific service, management and access policy, must meet the same standards required for pan-European research infrastructures. aiming at a more balanced development of the ERA); and/or the operation phase (e.g. access, data handling, outreach, training and international cooperation activities). This activity will also support design studies for new research infrastructures through a bottom-up approach. The aim is to open up, where appropriate, key national and regional research infrastructures to all European researchers, from both academia and industry, and to ensure the optimal use and joint development of these infrastructures. The Union will support networks and clusters that bring together and integrate, on European scale, key national research infrastructures. Funding will be provided to support, in particular, the transnational and virtual access of researchers and the harmonisation and improvement of the services that the infrastructures provide. The aim is to achieve by 2020 a world-leading capability in networking, computing and scientific data in a single and open European space for online research where researchers enjoy leading-edge, ubiquitous and reliable services for networking and computing, and seamless and open access to e-Science environments and global data resources. To achieve this goal, support will be given to: global research and education networks providing advanced, standardised and scalable inter-domain services on-demand; grid and cloud infrastructures providing virtually unlimited computational and data processing capacity; an ecosystem of supercomputing facilities, advancing towards exascale; a software and service infrastructure, e.g. for simulation and visualisation; real-time collaborative tools; and an interoperable, open and trusted scientific data infrastructure.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-04 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.