This website is aimed at research infrastructure managers and users, policy makers, and the general public interested in the development of Global Research Infrastructures (GRIs).

Research Infrastructures are hubs for global scientific cooperation and can make notable contributions to tackling global problems, where global cooperation and data sharing are essential to design solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the potential of international cooperation in science, and it has also shown the role of research infrastructures in this collaboration (through platforms for sharing tools for variant genomic surveillance and access to viral genomes from national sequencing efforts). The challenge we face with climate change is another clear example of the need for international cooperation: global environmental monitoring is essential, and a number of countries already cooperate on drifting floats, deep sea observatories and carbon observation, feeding in some cases into the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The fields of physics and astrophysics offer the classical examples of big, international facilities. They require infrastructures of a size and cost that can only be built through international cooperation. Digitalisation has enabled a new type of infrastructure based on data pooling and sharing, and we need to create governance models for the international research infrastructures we will need in the coming years.

The global conversation needs to intensify, and new partners need to join existing and future collaborations.