EInfraCentral's mission is to ensure that by 2020 a broader/ more varied set of users (including industry) benefits from European infrastructures. A common approach to defining and monitoring e-infrastructures services will increase their uptake. It will also enhance understanding of where improvement can be made in delivering services. The challenge is to shift towards an e-Infrastructure ''market place'' to initiate new service offerings and to engage with a broader set of users and needs. This will be achieved through an exchange of know-how between e-infrastructures consultations with a broad range of existing or potential users. EInfraCentral will pursue 3 specific objectives: 1. Structure an open and guided discussion between e-infrastructures to consensually define a common service catalogue 2. Develop a one-stop shop portal for users to browse the service catalogue and enhance the monitoring of key performance indicators that focus on availability and quality of services and user satisfaction 3. Draw policy lessons for a future European e-infrastructure market place as an extension of the common service catalogue and portal (incorporating a larger number of e-infrastructures). Key highlights of the proposal are: 1.A multidisciplinary team combining technical knowledge & insights from the e-infrastructure community with independent expertise in community building consultation, policy and data mapping and monitoring 2. A co-design process that will involve funders, the e-research infrastructure community and a representative user group (incl. SMEs) 3. On-going user interaction will guide the design and development of the eInfraCentral portal (as the main entry point to European e-infrastructures services) in two phases: a prototype with a first set of services and a full release with a KPI dashboard 4. Reinforce collaboration between e-infrastructures and optimise access to and increase uptake of e-infrastructures services by end users.

The aim of the project is to develop a model describing the socio-economic impact of research infrastructures and of their related financial investments. The model will be developed in a modular manner adapting it to a broad range of scientific domains and types of infrastructures. The project outcomes are expected to contribute to a common approach at international level and facilitate investments in research infrastructures by funding agencies and other stakeholders. The project activities will take into account the work of the Research Infrastructure Socio-Economic Impact Working group, being established by the OECD Global Science Forum, and involve major key international players in this domain. More specifically RI Impact Pathways project plans to carry out a comprehensive stocktaking exercise on the existing approaches for impact assessment of research infrastructures and map the current and future data gathering needs of the key stakeholder groups. The goal is to identify the strengths and limitations of the existing approaches, detect existing gaps and overlaps, as well as to assess the level of complexity of the developed conceptual advances. Further, a set of activities will be devoted to map the needs of various stakeholders associated with IA of RIs. Employing participatory and systems thinking approaches the project will develop a modular impact assessment model that represents all major impact pathways of distinct types of research infrastructures. The IA model will be put to practice by defining a set of reference indicators, providing guidance on the most appropriate monitoring and evaluation approaches and testing its feasibility with pilot research infrastructures. The outcomes of the project will be a methodological handbook and an interactive web-based tool that will facilitate more user-friendly navigation in the prepared guidance material.

This proposal responds to the call Next generation of scientific instrumentation, tools and methods (2022) (HORIZON-INFRA-2022-TECH-01). The proposal seeks to directly address the challenges to develop a new world-class research instrument integrating already existing NREN and EPOS infrastructures and Copernicus Marine service, from three European nations, as well as Pan-European and Pan-American institutions, to disseminate FAIR compliant State of Polarisation and Distributed Acoustic Sensor data, gathered from the same, already installed, live, telecommunications submarine optical fibres, in a temporally consistent and geographically dispersed way. Such an instrument would deliver innovative scientific instrumentation, methods and tools as well as advancing the involved research infrastructures by developing new state of the art services and long-term data sets of unique scientific value. This project will enable continuous recording of these types of data for research use by NRENs for the first time, thus supporting of diverse academic, industrial and governmental user communities. Through the integration with EPOS data infrastructure , existing research communities in solid earth (EPOS) and marine science (EMSO), industrial and public body communities can be complimented with entirely new types of data sets unavailable to them before, which it is believed will lead to new areas of research.

The FUTURESILIENCE project aims to strengthen European economic and social resilience through an enhanced ability to quickly respond to future crises. This will be accomplished by facilitating the fast and effective use of policy relevant research and innovation (R&I) findings for actors at national, regional and local level. The project has four specific objectives: 1) Map existing policy relevant European R&I findings with high potential to inform policy making for economic and social resilience, and to help address societal challenges at local level 2) Define a set of methodologies for testing in how far the identified R&I findings can inform policies addressing national, regional and local needs 3) Implement the testing methodologies through multi-stakeholder experiments across Europe in co-creation with stakeholders from research, policy, economy, civil society organisations as well as citizens 4) Develop a Knowledge Base of the successfully tested research findings with high capacity to inform policy actors and a Toolbox of methods for testing policy relevant research findings FUTURESILIENCE will set up 'Future Resilience Labs' to test policy relevant R&I findings through 10 pilot exercises: three pre-identified working on climate change, migration and the financial crisis and urban planning; and seven selected through an open call. During the experimentation, multiple stakeholders will discuss and test evidence-based strategies tailored to their specific context and matching their local needs, aiming at reducing vulnerabilities and increasing capacities to be prepared for multiple types of possible crisis. The project will be implemented by a robust consortium with know-how in the fields of resilience, R&I policy and crisis management as well as experience with various co-creation and participative methodologies and specifically hands-on experience with foresight, scenario planning, virtual simulation and agent-based modelling.

ST4TE adopts a multidimensional approach to study the relationship between the green, digital and twin transition (TT) and inequalities. The project aims to investigate the impact of the TT on inequalities among individuals and territories and explore how existing inequalities affect the transition paths creating cycles of inequalities. ST4TE uses both quantitative methods (econometrics, machine-learning and agent-based modelling) and qualitative methods (narrative interviews, case studies and workshops) to analyse different patterns of inequalities and envisage custom made policies to counterbalance the unequal effects of the TT. ST4TE objectives are: 1) Understand the different drivers of the TT and measure the progress in European regions to identify the level of regional readiness and existing or potential vulnerabilities; 2) Identify types of inequalities including income, skill- job- and health- related inequalities, as well as age/gender and other intersecting inequalities and investigate new forms of social inequality that emerge or widen due to the TT; 3) Examine how the TT can increase existing inequalities leading to a vicious cycle between higher inequality and unequal impacts of the transition. The focus will be on four drivers: policies, consumption, education and STI; 4) Model the effects of TT policies, assess their territorial impact, develop forward looking scenarios, and define pathways for knowledge-based policymaking using tools and recommendations, that will ultimately address negative socio-economic effects caused by the TT; 5) Maximise the project’s visibility by communicating and disseminating ST4TE activities and progress and support the exploitation of its results, with emphasis on policy engagement and co-design of recommendation. Overall, ST4TE will go beyond the state-of-the-art as it can have significant implications on the twin transformation of cities and regions and the design of social cohesion and place-based innovation policies.