Maturity Assessment of Research Infrastructures of Strategic Interest

The monitoring of the implementation of the National Roadmap of Research Infrastructures of Strategic Interest (RNIE), as well as the analysis of the socioeconomic return of research infrastructures and the promotion of synergies with ESFRI, among other functions, are the responsibility of the Research Infrastructures Monitoring Committee, set up by FCT under Regulation No. 327/2013 (RNIE Regulation). In 2015, FCT asked the Monitoring Committee to perform a first analysis of the maturity of the implementation of the infrastructures integrated in RNIE in the previous year, and their ability to serve the scientific community.

Taking into account the integration of 12 new infrastructures in the RNIE in 2019, as well as the fact that four years have already passed since the previous maturity analysis, FCT decided to start in the last quarter of 2019 a new maturity assessment of research infrastructures, which kept as reference the ESFRI methodology, with due adaptations to the national context.

The maturity assessment took place between October 2019 and February 2020, and 28 experts from the Monitoring Committee participated in the process, as well as 8 external evaluators from the Committee. The 52 national infrastructures integrated in RNIE at the time were covered by the evaluation, as well as three other infrastructures identified by the FCT Directive Council as being of high strategic relevance and that would be integrated in RNIE 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, FCT published, in June 2020, the RNIE update, which reflects the integration of a total of 16 new national research infrastructures in the Roadmap, determined in the dispatches no. 5220/2020, no. 4958/2020, no. 7557/2019, no. 4157/2019 of the Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education.

The Report describing the evaluation process and its results can be downloaded here.