News

Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste hosted the 2nd ERIC Network Meeting

On the 10th and 11th December Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, statutory seat of the distributed research infrastructure CERIC-ERIC, hosted the 2nd ERIC Network Meeting. Representatives from existing and pending accession ERICs met to share experiences and challenging issues encountered on their way to setting up and running the new Pan-European institutions.

After a first presentation of CERIC-ERIC, all the participants presented themselves and the ERICs to which they belong. Existing ERICs act in fields ranging from clinical research to ocean observation, from research in material sciences, language, art, humanities and social sciences to translational medicine. Moreover, they provide biobanks and biomolecular resources, as well as data on social attitudes and on population aging.

The meeting was a way of sharing experiences and good practices among more or less newly constituted ERICs, in order to face new challenges related to access to European Funds, recruitment processes, the provision of insurance, the pan-European Pension Fund RESAVER and more general fiscal issues.

Harry Tuinder, from the DG RTD of the European Commission, was present to answer the numerous questions about possible actions to be taken in order to make ERICs sustainable, competitive and efficient to the utmost. He encountered the widest satisfaction from the participants, who have already agreed on a new meeting to be held in the coming year to continue the discussion, enriching it with new topics, new issues and, certainly, with reports about good results and best practices from which to take example.

By means of Council Regulation No 723/2009, the European Commission settled a new legal framework to support the development of research infrastructures in Europe, defining the rules and the conditions to set up ERICs as legal entities contributing to the development of the European Research Area (ERA).