Summary of Policy Recommendations Drawn from the e-IRG Blue Paper on Data Management

Research infrastructures (RIs), such as the initiatives on the ESFRI roadmap, produce and are dependent on rapidly increasing amounts of data. For research and society to take full beneft of the major investments in RIs the data needs to be made openly and easily available for researchers, over wide spans of felds, in sustainable settings. To enable this, the data needs to be managed, stored and preserved in a cost-effcient way, with appropriate quality and safety assurances. Also, access to the data across borders and domain boundaries must be secured. e-infrastructures provide the versatile services and tools needed for both data management and access, but the development of such infrastructure must be complemented with an effort on RI policy and coordination to accomplish the goals above in practice. This effort must be driven by the needs of the researchers, but many stakeholders needs to be orchestrated to complete the build-up of data infrastructures rapidly while still arriving at sustainable and cost-effcient solutions. In 2012, e-IRG presented a Blue Paper on this topic with a focus on the needs of large RIs such as the ESFRI Roadmap initiatives. This summary contains the main policy recommendations of the 2012 Blue Paper, extracted to provide a comprehensive list of actions that should be taken to arrive at situation where research and society can reap the full benefts of major RIs.