Monitoring the implementation of the National Roadmap of Research Infrastructures of Strategic Interest (RNIE), as well as analyzing the socio-economic return of research infrastructures and promoting synergies with ESFRI, among other tasks, are the responsibility of the Research Infrastructures Monitoring Committee, set up by the FCT under the terms of Regulation no. 327/2013 (RNIE Regulation). In 2015, the FCT asked the Monitoring Committee to carry out an initial analysis of the maturity of the implementation of the infrastructures integrated into the NREN in the previous year, and their capacity to serve the scientific community.
Taking into account the integration of 12 new infrastructures into the NREN in 2019, as well as the fact that four years have passed since the previous maturity analysis, the FCT decided to start a new maturity assessment of research infrastructures in the last quarter of 2019, which kept the ESFRI methodology as a reference, with the necessary adaptations to the national context.
The maturity assessment took place between October 2019 and February 2020, with 28 experts from the Monitoring Committee participating in the process, as well as 8 assessors from outside the Committee. The assessment covered the 52 national infrastructures integrated into the NREN at the time, as well as three other infrastructures identified by the FCT Board of Directors as being of high strategic relevance and which would be integrated into the NREN in 2020.
The vast majority of the infrastructures analyzed were considered by the Monitoring Committee to be of medium (37%) or high (46%) maturity.
Following the conclusion of this maturity assessment, the FCT published the RNIE update in June 2020, which reflects the integration of a total of 16 new national research infrastructures into the Roadmap, as determined in orders no. 5220/2020, no. 4958/2020, no. 7557/2019, no. 4157/2019 of the Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education.
The report describing the evaluation process and its results can be downloaded here.