14-May-2026
On 12 May, the ACCESS2ACCESS project officially started with a kick-off meeting of the project consortium. This meeting brought together a broad group of research infrastructure stakeholders, scientific communities, users, and policy experts from across Europe. The project will work closely with the community to co-design future models for transnational access to research infrastructures and develop recommendations that will help shape future European frameworks.
ACCESS2ACCESS aims to ensure that the future of transnational access reflects the needs of Europe’s highly diverse research infrastructure landscape. The project will engage communities across the full breadth of science and technology. This includes life sciences, biomedical and health research, social sciences and humanities, environmental and Earth sciences, photon and neutron sciences, physics, chemistry, materials science, engineering, energy research, digital infrastructures, and high-performance computing. The project will also involve a wide range of user communities and research infrastructure models, including both distributed and single-site infrastructures.
A central objective of the project is to gather broad community input and identify best practices to propose inclusive and widely supported models for future transnational access implementation. Given the strategic importance of transnational access for European research and innovation, the project’s recommendations are expected to have a significant long-term impact on how access to research infrastructures is organised in the coming decade, helping to inform sustainable and future-oriented access models for the next generation of European research programmes.
Instruct-ERIC will work together with CLARIN ERIC to assess important factors such as access barriers, user journeys, expectations for support services, and preferred access modalities. The analysis will combine both quantitative and qualitative methods to build a comprehensive understanding of user needs and access barriers. Ultimately, this will identify recurring themes which will allow better understanding of the experiences of service-users and identify practical opportunities for improving access across research infrastructures. We will also develop a blueprint for an AI-assisted, problem-driven framework that will help users identify the most appropriate facilities, services, and expertise for their scientific and innovation challenges.
The consortium includes 17 partners in the core executive team: Euro-BioImaging ERIC (project co-ordinators), European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), European X-ray Free-Electron Laser Facility GmbH (EuXFEL), Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), AnaEE ERIC, ACTRIS ERIC, BBMRI-ERIC, Instruct-ERIC, INRAE (IBISBA), ECCSEL ERIC, National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS), CLARIN ERIC, Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), CERIC-ERIC, European Science Foundation (ESF), Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), and INESC TEC. The partners span all major scientific domains and combine substantial expertise in research infrastructure operations, user access, digital technologies, and science policy.
Taken together, ACCESS2ACCESS addresses one of the most important strategic questions facing European science and innovation: how to ensure that world-class research infrastructures remain discoverable, accessible, and sustainably available to the brightest ideas, regardless of user background, discipline, sector, or country.
