Swedish Presidency of the European Union
Sweden presides over the meetings of EU-27 between July and December 2009. Read more of the Swedish EU presidency www.se2009.eu/en/.
In the second half of 2009, the e-IRG workshop and meetings are organised in Sweden. The local host organisation is SNIC (www.snic.vr.se), the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, which is a metacentre within the Swedish Research Council (www.vr.se).
| Contact details: SNIC Uppsala University Box 337 751 05 Uppsala |
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Calendar of events during the Swedish presidency:
- e-IRG Workshop in Uppsala , 14-15 October, 2009
A main research-oriented activity already in the very start of the Swedish presidency was the conference New Worlds New Solutions organized by the Swedish Research Council in Lund 7-8 July, 2009.
The conference resulted in the Lund Declaration, which in summary states that the overall vision for how European research should develop is: More focus, less territorial thinking in the research community and more both cross-faculty and cross-border cooperation.
The Lund Declaration also reflects the Swedish Presidency’s main priorities regarding research, see the Work Programme of the Swedish Presidency, where the focus is on how the EU is to use its research resources in an efficient way, and to agree on what these research resources should be used for and how the investments should be coordinated and managed.
Prioritised areas in e-Infrastructures for research:
Today, e-Infrastructure resources are critical for almost all fields of research. e-Science techniques pave the way for highly cost-efficient and rapid progress in numerous research fields, and using e-Infrastructure tools is critical to build and develop cross-disciplinary and cross-border collaborations. Providing a set of coordinated, horizontal e-Infrastructure services is an essential part of national and European research strategies. However, the horizontal nature of e-Infrastructure also poses some challenges for the e-Infrastructure area:
- Involvement of the users: It is of highest priority that the e-Infrastructure services provided are adapted to the needs of the researchers using e-Science tools. This calls for effective processes for user involvement when building and operating e-Infrastructure.
- Flexible and transparent access, coordination of different e-Infrastructures: For the users, it is very important that the access modes for e-Infrastructure fulfil their needs, and that access is transparent within and between different e-Infrastructures. This puts demands on services at different levels, from authorization to cross-utilization and combination of advanced services.
- Accountability and prioritisation: e-Infrastructures are used by a multitude of fields, and in discussions on prioritization such horizontal research infrastructures are compared to topical efforts of different types. It is essential to provide mechanisms where the scientific impact of different types of e-Infrastructures can be compared. This also implies that the usage and build-up of e-Infrastructures should be governed by the resulting scientific impact. Here, peer-review schemes of different types can be applied to guarantee this.
