Eleven Tenets for Managing Europe’s Research Infrastructures Sustainably

Europe’s biggest collaborative research facilities, from biodiversity data hubs to large-scale environmental observatories, now have a new blueprint for how they should be run. A study published in the Biodiversity Data Journal proposes an eleven-tenet framework for the integrated, evolving and sustainable management of European Research Infrastructure Consortia, known as ERICs. These legally constituted entities operate under a common European regulatory framework and represent the primary large-scale research infrastructures spanning the continent. The framework extends an existing ten-tenet approach borrowed from environmental management by adding an explicit dimension that has long been implicit: enabling scientific excellence. The result is a management scaffold that brings together scientific, technological, economic, administrative, political, legal, societal, environmental, ethical, cultural and communication considerations into one coherent structure.

Research infrastructures are complex socio-technical systems that sit at the heart of scientific discovery, innovation and evidence-informed policy. Within the European Research Area, substantial investments have been made in facilities, resources and services used by research communities to conduct research and promote innovation. The European Commission has organised these infrastructures into thematic Science Clusters embedded within the evolving European Open Science Cloud ecosystem, but the Clusters themselves lack legal status and function mainly as coordination mechanisms. That means the responsibility for ensuring integrated, adaptive and sustainable operations rests largely with the individual ERICs, which makes robust and coherent management frameworks all the more important.

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, ESFRI, already runs a detailed mandatory monitoring scheme for Landmark research infrastructures, structured around general information, a scientific case and an implementation case. The monitoring spans political support, financial commitment, scientific excellence and impact, governance, operations and service delivery. Yet the study argues that this approach, while highly detailed and operational, does not explicitly provide a unifying conceptual structure linking these dimensions. The eleven-tenet framework is designed to fill that gap, offering an integrated structure through which ESFRI monitoring dimensions can be interpreted, aligned and implemented. The tenets are intended to be used as a structured checklist for strategic reflection, gap analysis, adaptive management and future assessment, ensuring that no critical aspect of infrastructure functioning is overlooked.

The framework has clear intellectual ancestry. In environmental management, particularly marine ecosystems, tenet-based approaches evolved from six to seven to ten tenets, incorporating ethical, cultural and communication dimensions alongside the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors captured by PESTLE analysis. Similar multidimensional thinking appears in business and organisational analysis and in principles-based approaches to open scholarly infrastructure, including FAIR, CARE, POSI and FOREST. Recent work on open by design research infrastructures argues that existing open-science frameworks provide important principles and evaluative lenses but do not by themselves offer an integrated design and implementation framework for infrastructure builders. The eleven-tenet framework responds to the same need from a management perspective, moving from fragmented checklists towards a coherent structure through which openness, governance, sustainability, community engagement, interoperability and evaluation can be embedded across the infrastructure lifecycle.

The eleven tenets are organised into three tiers arranged as a concentric model. The core tier defines the fundamental purpose and enabling conditions of an ERIC, bringing together the newly introduced tenet of enabling scientific excellence with technological feasibility and economic viability. The structural tier encompasses the governance and organisational mechanisms required for effective operation within its institutional and policy context, including administrative achievement, political alignment and legal governance, which together constitute governance in the combined sense of policies, politics, administration and legislation. The contextual tier addresses the broader environment in which the infrastructure operates, covering societal desirability, environmental, energy and ecological sustainability, cultural inclusiveness, ethical soundness and effective communication. The tiers are complementary rather than hierarchical, and the tenets are interdependent rather than sequential: failure to adequately address any single tenet may compromise the overall effectiveness of the infrastructure.

A key conceptual distinction runs through the framework. In the context of ERICs, scientific excellence is not an intrinsic property of the infrastructure itself but an exogenous outcome generated by the research communities it supports. The role of any ERIC is therefore to enable such excellence through the provision of high-quality FAIR-compliant data, advanced reproducible analytics, robust computational environments and effective support to user communities. Evidence for this tenet includes the quality, accessibility and interoperability of services and data, the strength and diversity of user communities, the effectiveness of access policies including transnational access, and the degree to which the infrastructure supports high-impact scientific outputs. Indicators may include user uptake, research products enabled by the infrastructure such as datasets, workflows and publications, contributions to interdisciplinary research and engagement in co-design and co-creation processes with scientific communities.

Technological feasibility requires digital operational readiness, including a coherent service architecture, interoperable APIs, data and metadata pipelines, authentication and authorisation mechanisms, cybersecurity controls, monitoring dashboards, backup and disaster-recovery procedures, user support mechanisms, documentation and clearly defined service-level expectations. ESFRI monitoring emphasises interoperability with other research infrastructures, especially those within the same Science Cluster and the EOSC landscape, data management strategies aligned with FAIR principles, the use of national, European and international repositories, the ability to federate distributed open data resources and reproducible analytics into an interoperable research ecosystem, and lifecycle management with upgrade strategies. Economic viability, meanwhile, demands secured member contributions and financial commitments over multi-annual periods, robust financial governance with auditing of accounting and budget systems, diversification of income streams, cost recovery schemes, collaboration with industry, forward-looking financial planning, SWOT analysis and a risk strategy employing tools such as risk registries and bow-tie analysis. Where decommissioning is foreseen, the relevant costs should be estimated in advance.

The structural and contextual tiers extend management beyond the machine room. Administrative achievement calls for clearly defined governance arrangements, decision-making processes, internal audit mechanisms and key performance indicators linked to strategic objectives, supported by operational dashboards, usage analytics, access statistics and FAIRness indicators. Political alignment requires strategic direction consistent with research and policy priorities at European, national, regional and local levels, horizontal integration with non-ERIC bodies, inclusion in national roadmaps, and alignment with global policy frameworks such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and One Health, with return on investment narratives for partnering countries. Legal governance demands compliance with the ERIC Regulation and national legal frameworks, attention to intellectual property rights, data protection and liability management, and for digital ERICs, clear data licensing, controlled access where required, auditability, identity and access management, cybersecurity-by-design and documented incident response. Contextual tenets require regular collection of societal needs and structured co-design with stakeholders, measurable environmental and energy performance including energy consumption, carbon footprint and energy-aware computing, promotion of diversity, gender equality and equal opportunities in line with the United Nations Disability Inclusion Strategy, ethical governance frameworks with codes of conduct and ethics advisory boards, and structured communication strategies tailored to different audiences.

The study is candid about the practical impediments to achieving all eleven tenets simultaneously. Some dimensions, such as technological feasibility, economic viability, administrative achievability, environmental sustainability and communication effectiveness, can often be supported by relatively explicit indicators like service availability, budget stability, staffing capacity, energy use, user uptake or outreach metrics. Other dimensions, including political alignment, societal desirability, ethical soundness, cultural inclusiveness and the enabling of scientific excellence, are more difficult to quantify because they depend on context, stakeholder interpretation, long-term effects and qualitative forms of legitimacy. This creates a risk that more easily measurable tenets receive disproportionate attention while less quantifiable but equally important dimensions are under-represented in assessment and management. For this reason, the authors argue the framework should be implemented through a mixed approach combining quantitative metrics, qualitative evidence, stakeholder judgement, case studies and periodic reflective review.

Although grounded in the European context, the framework addresses management challenges that extend well beyond the European Research Area. Comparable large-scale research infrastructure arrangements exist internationally, including the United States National Science Foundation major facilities and mid-scale research infrastructure, Australia’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy and China’s major science and technology infrastructures, indicating that the need for integrated, sustainable and adaptive management is global. The study lays the conceptual foundation for a subsequent analysis focusing on the practical assessment of ERIC performance, identifying for each tenet the type of evidence that would indicate successful and sustainable management. The next step will be to translate these evidence categories into measurable indicators, assessment criteria and evaluation methodologies. If successful, the eleven-tenet framework could become the shared vocabulary through which Europe’s research infrastructures demonstrate their value to science, society and policy for decades to come.

Subject of Research: An eleven-tenet framework for the integrated, evolving and sustainable management of European Research Infrastructure Consortia

Article Title: Eleven tenets for the integrated, evolving and sustainable management of European Research Infrastructure Consortia

Article References: Arvanitidis, C., Huertas Olivares, C. I., Elliott, M., Basset, A., Fouilloux, A., Graber-Soudry, O., Koureas, D., de Moncuit, L., Roberts, R., Saenz-Albanes, A. J., & van Tienderen, P. (2026). Eleven tenets for the integrated, evolving and sustainable management of European Research Infrastructure Consortia. Biodiversity Data Journal, 14, Article e212181. https://doi.org/10.3897/bdj.14.e212181

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/BDJ.14.e212181

Keywords: research infrastructures, ERIC, ESFRI, FAIR data, European Open Science Cloud, science policy, sustainability, governance, Eleven, tenets, integrated, evolving