Towards a sustainable EU-LAC partnership in research infrastructures

H2020 EU-LAC ResInfra project served to boost the bi-regional collaboration on research infrastructures (RIs) between European Union (EU) and Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries. To this aim a variety of different activities were developed that have proven the importance of RIs as a key pillar in boosting the R&D activities between regions and the need to maintain a sustainable collaboration at governmental level. Despite the success of the results of EU-LAC ResInfra Project, there is still work to do in order to have a solid and sustainable framework of cooperation to enhance the bi-regional collaboration on research infrastructures. Latin America and the Caribbean has a unique landscape of natural laboratories that can provide comparative advantages to host the development of RI’s, as well as high impact science on specific thematic areas that are a priority in both regions. It has been deemed necessary to increase the visibility of both EU and LAC RI models and characteristics to advance in a greater collaboration for a common roadmapping exercise, agreements in long term funding, transnational access, capacity building and mutual openness for the development of a RIs common area. EU-LAC ResInfra Plus has brought together a wide and comprehensive consortium of 20 crucial partners from the EU and LAC countries. The project includes a balanced mix of governmental representatives responsible of the development of RIs policies at national level, RTD funding agencies from EU countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Romania, and Spain) and LAC countries (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Peru and Uruguay,) as well as a consolidated group of European RIs: Instruct-ERIC, LifeWatch-ERIC, RICAP and MIRRI-ERIC. This broad spectrum of partners gathers to all the RIs stakeholders to ensure that the project activities and outputs serve to strengthening the bi-regional collaboration.