End of the year message from ESFRI Chair

Dear members of the Research Infrastructure community,

The year coming to an end was a fruitful one for ESFRI. We celebrated the 20th anniversary and launched a new chapter with the ESFRI Stakeholders Forum. In December’s Competitiveness Council Conclusions, the Ministers agreed that Research Infrastructures (RIs) constitute a fundamental pillar of research and innovation ecosystems and underlined the role of ESFRI in creating a more coherent RI policy-making in Europe. To enable further development of the EU RI ecosystem, they set an ambitious and elaborated agenda for the further development of the field. ESFRI has been tasked with performing the landscape analysis and the preparation of a new Roadmap. In addition to these ambitious tasks, which are flagship outputs of ESFRI, it has also been asked to deliver on activities which will further contribute to the functioning of the RIs, addressing topics such as RI monitoring, funding, access, impact, international and industry cooperation, energy crisis and stakeholder engagement.

We know that these tasks cannot be accomplished in isolation and that close cooperation with the various stakeholders is needed. To this end, you will observe an increased level of requests for engagement, which should contribute to a better understanding of your needs, views and bottlenecks and enable mutual learning. It will also help shape shared objectives and measures, thus increasing our activities' legitimacy and broad ownership, ultimately enhancing the quality of the outputs.

At ESFRI, twelve groups are currently working on delivering on the Council’s request. While we will strive to collate the various requests for your input from our working groups, you will observe an increased activity rate. We thank you for all your efforts in co-creating a high-quality and competitive RI ecosystem thus far and look forward to your continued support.

I am looking forward to working with you on RI-related challenges in 2023 and wish you happy holidays and a prosperous New Year,

Jana Kolar
ESFRI Chair