The International Conference of Research Infrastructures (ICRI) that was held in October brought to the table some interesting reflections on the role of Research Infrastructures (RIs) in tackling so-called grand societal challenges, including the environment, climate change, medicine and energy. All these topics must be addressed as global and require intensive and effective collaboration.

RIs can be a powerful tool to facilitate trust and cooperation between nations and cultures since they operate on a broad open access policy that allows vast and diverse user communities to achieve results that would be very difficult to achieve individually.

However, user access to RIs has undergone significant changes in recent years and is destined to change. Users have become less expert, and access has been mainly remote and automated, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides, teams are cross-disciplinary and involve various institutions and countries; they use multiple techniques to answer complex questions, making datasets too large to be processed at home institutions. More diverse access, such as remote or automation, or even RIs joining forces can be a solution. It is no coincidence that IBISBA teamed up with leading European RIs in three Horizon Europe-funded projects and has become part of LifeScience RI, the ecosystem of Life Science Research Infrastructures.

On the other hand, IBISBA took part in an initiative proposed by AQUAEXCEL3.0 (https://aquaexcel.eu/), a European project aiming at boosting the EU aquaculture sector by expanding the Transnational Access programme (TNA). The objective was to find potential connections in the field of blue biotechnology to set up joint TNAs to facilitate user access and expand the user base.