The 9th Meeting of the Group of Senior Officials (GSO) on Global Research Infrastructures (GRI) will be held on 15-16 May 2017 in Naples, Italy. The Meeting is jointly hosted by the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) and the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn (SZN) on behalf of the Italian government. The Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research will be represented by the scientific Counselor of the Minister, Prof. Luigi Nicolais. The two hosting research organizations actively participate, also with a coordinating role, in Research Infrastructures of the ESFRI Roadmap, namely the European Plate Observing Systems (EPOS), the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory (EMSO) and European Marine Biological Research Center (EMBRC).
The GSO was set up in 2008 by the G8+5 to establish a non-binding and open forum for policy exchanges on global research infrastructures and since then it has developed a collaboration framework including a definition of Global Research Infrastructure (GRI). The Group is now exploring collaboration opportunities of a number of large research infrastructure initiatives that have demonstrated a significant level of maturity towards becoming potential GRIs.
During the 9th Meeting, the GSO will evaluate the analysis of five Case Studies of large research infrastructure initiatives based on application of the principles of the collaboration framework and will discuss policy issues concerning sharing and management of data, open innovation and global excellent-driven access of GRIs.
The progress on the activities of the GSO will also be reported to the G7 Science Ministers’ meeting that will take place in September 2017 in Torino, Italy.