The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) has published the new National Roadmap for Research Infrastructures of Strategic Interest (RNIE) available here.

The term “research infrastructure” refers to facilities, resources and related services that scientific communities use to develop cutting-edge research and innovation in specific fields, from social sciences to engineering and life sciences. It encompasses large-scale research installations, arrays of scientific equipment, collections, archives and databases, computational systems, communication networks for open access. These may be single-sited, distributed over several locations, cities or countries, or virtual, that is, provided electronically.

Core to any research infrastructure is its capacity to provide services to national and international scientific and educational communities, as well as to businesses and industry.

Towards this goal, a call for research infrastructures (RIs) to be included in the National Roadmap of Research Infrastructures of Strategic Relevance was launched in 2013. The FCT call mapped and assessed existing research infrastructures, identified national priority areas and brought Portugal into the group of European countries who have produced their own national roadmaps, in alignment with the European Strategic Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), set up in 2002. 

Forty research infrastructures are included in the publication National Roadmap of Research Infrastructures of Strategic Relevance that integrates the EMSO-PT project: the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory (Portugal).