Congratulations to the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) for its 20 years of successful collaboration among EU Member States and Associated Countries to develop the network of competitive and open access research infrastructures in Europe.
Three former ESFRI Chairs, John Womersley, Sergio Rossi and Jan Hrušák have signed up to support Stick to Science and express their worries concerning future collaboration in Europe.
Read the article in Science Business.
Scientific cooperation between Switzerland and the European Union has a very long tradition and includes highlights such as the founding of CERN in 1954. CERN is the world’s largest research centre in the field of particle physics. Switzerland is also a founding member of the European Space Agency (ESA), established in 1975, and has been cooperating with the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) in the field of nuclear fusion and plasma physics since 1978 – a few of many examples.
The UK has a long-standing relationship in research with the European Union Member States. Similarly to Switzerland, the UK is a member of CERN, and multiple pan-European research organisations, such as: the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the ITER Organisation, the European Space Agency among others.
The UK hosts the headquarters of 6 pan-European research facilities, distributed across multiple participating countries, and is part of ten pan-European research facilities located in other European countries. Similarly to Switzerland, the UK is a member of pan-European research facilities entirely based beyond its borders, such as the European Hard X-Ray Free Electron Laser (European XFEL) based in Germany.
The current involvement of Switzerland and the UK in ESFRI is compiled on the ESFRI website.
Every additional month of the exclusion of Switzerland and the UK to Horizon Europe damages long-standing research networks built over years and thus the quality of European cutting-edge research such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and climate mitigation.