Q&A: the European Commission's Jean-Eric Paquet and CFI's Dr. Roseann O'Reilly Runte on research infrastructure after COVID-19

Research infrastructure—that is, the laboratories, databases and physical structures supporting research activities—is vital for scientific discovery. Canada and countries around the world have made large investments in research infrastructure in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has revealed the need for a rapid response from scientists in the face of a crisis.

The European Commission—the executive branch of the EU and a major research funder—is embarking on a new research program for 2021-27 called Horizon Europe, which has a budget of €95.5 billion that includes €2.4 billion for research infrastructure. In Canada, meanwhile, the 2021 federal budget provided the Canada Foundation for Innovation with $500 million over four years that will in part support the research infrastructure needs of universities and research hospitals.

Research Money spoke to Jean-Eric Paquet, the director general of the European Commission's Directorate on Research and Innovation, along with Dr. Roseann O'Reilly Runte, the president and CEO of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, on how COVID-19 affected their approach to research infrastructure and how those lessons will carry forward into the future.

How has COVID-19 changed the way we think about research infrastructure?

Jean-Eric Paquet: I don't think it has changed it, but it has illustrated the value of research infrastructure, distributed infrastructure and data infrastructure in particular.

There are two striking examples which I think have made the responses to the pandemic much deeper and faster. The first one is the European Virus Archive, which is a European project but is in fact a global project. We have partners on the archive around the world. It was the key infrastructure which allowed the key genome analyses to be done in a matter of days at the beginning of 2020.

As we moved into the pandemic, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), which is the life sciences infrastructure in Europe, set up—together with the European Commission—a data platform on COVID-19 where we now have more than half a million raw sequences, viral sequences. We have more than three million users. This was really a platform which was European to begin with, but which was used by scientists around the world to share their research results and their data—which is as important as research results itself.

It shows that research infrastructures play an absolutely key role to bring the science community together in an open science context, in this case, and allow it to create global solutions to COVID-19. There was a lot of nationalism as well, but that's another discussion.

Roseann O'Reilly Runte: I would like to emphasize the fact that the research started decades ago — even centuries ago. For at least 10 years, we've been making these databases and making the research that we were able to put together rapidly. So it wasn't a miracle. What happened with the pandemic was a sense of urgency that brought researchers around the world to drop what they were doing and focus their attention on a single problem.

You can see wonderful examples, like the researcher from Princeton University who worked with researchers in Milan and people in Canada, our SNOLAB physics labs, to create a ventilator that would be available anywhere in the world inexpensively. Shortly after the pandemic was announced, there was an international document signed by researchers across the country to make their research on the pandemic available to everybody without copyright and patents. It was a moment of crisis that crystallized people's thinking and made them start moving together in a more deliberate way than in the past.

I want to talk a little more about open science. Would you say the pandemic accelerated the open science trend?

Paquet: We'll have to see down the road.

Key science journals, which are not open access, made pandemic-related research available on day one, which is essentially what research funders around the world, in the so-called Plan S, are now recommending. [Editor's note: Plan S is a plan put forward by a coalition of major European funders to mandate a move to full and immediate open access for all of their funded research articles. The European Commission is one of the members.]

The Commission is part of Plan S, and very concretely, this means that research we would fund in Horizon Europe [would be open access]...We will require that any publication is immediately accessible. So either you publish in a fully open access journal—that's one route—or you publish in a non-open access journal, which will remain possible. But at the same time you must make the peer-reviewed article available on the repository.

The European Commission has created a repository precisely for that purpose so it will be available to researchers. It is already available today to start using it. For now, we are also paying article processing charges for researchers, which is a big, big component of the publication story, and we are doing this in a relatively open, liberal way, including for hybrid journals. [Editor’s note: hybrid journals are paywalled but allow researchers to pay to make their articles open access.]

But as we now really want to ensure that the shift to open access publication takes place, we will now limit the availability of these article processing charges [APCs] to only articles for open-access journals. Let's say you are a life sciences researcher and you want to go to Nature. You can do it, no problem, but you don't get your APC reimbursed and you need to put it in your university's repository.

With that, we will, I have no doubt, accelerate the movement towards open access. I have been discussing this with Nature to an extent and also with Science, the AAAS publication in the US. This is the direction of travel. Whether Plan S was there—it was there before the pandemic—and the pandemic has demonstrated the value of immediate open access. I think there is no way back on it.

Runte: Dr. Nemer, our chief science advisor, is working on a report that will be complete by December this year as I understand. We are moving a little more slowly than the European community, very deliberately, because it isn't just a question of publication and researchers. It's also a question of how we work with industry and business and support their economic aspirations, how we actually support publications in Canada and how we collaborate with the rest of the world.

Obviously, we are moving towards open science. We signed the open science declaration before the time of the pandemic, and we're looking as we move forward to what we have to do to ensure that your research, our researchers and business all survive and do well in that new climate. So it's one of those things where before you dive, you test the water.

For Jean-Eric Paquet, what are the major policy priorities for the new Horizon Europe program?

Horizon Europe is a very broad program. The easy answer is that we support excellence in fundamental research, we want to make a difference in scaling up deep tech innovation, and at the same time, we want research results that allow us to make an impact on the economy and on society. In health, in climate, in energy, in transport, and the environment.

[In terms of] the urgency of the climate and environmental transformation needed, this is a revolution, not an evolution. We don't have time for evolution anymore. We need to make a difference by 2030 and obviously by 2050. The urgency demonstrated by science itself is at the highest ever. We need to ensure that research outcomes are coming fast, hard, and have a real impact.

We have the Horizon Europe missions, inspired by the man on the moon, conceptually. We have a mission on cities, where the objective is to have 100 European cities that are climate-neutral by 2030. This is a very, very tall order. The idea here is that in the next couple of years, we are going to continue to invest in technology, in platforms to experiment with citizens and society, and then use that with other instruments, non research related instruments, to deploy these solutions in 100 cities.

This requires high-end fundamental research in the program and in member states, it requires great innovators—we believe deep tech innovation is not just about making money but also about providing disruptive solutions—and you need, at a large scale, applied research and industrial partnerships between national programs to have this range of programs to allow the transformation to take place.

I'm not super optimistic, but I'm super ambitious and I think that the instruments which are available at the European level are adequate. Let's now have to ensure that they are deployed fast and picked up in the deployment.

Tell me about these mission areas for Europe. With so many parties and interests involved in Europe, how do you come to agreement on these mission areas?

Paquet: The areas for the five missions—oceans, clean soils, carbon-neutral cities, climate adapted regions and cancer—were agreed between ministers and parliamentarians together with the Commission. This is the normal legislative process which is cumbersome when seen from the outside, but quite a well-oiled machinery. The convergence was pretty natural… These are five areas that, for the political debate and expectations from citizens, are quite straightforward.

Identifying the areas was the easy part. Then we set up mission boards, which were scientists but also representatives of civil society, members of industry, local politicians. These boards then worked to identify more specifically what we hoped to achieve with these five missions... We now have these very concrete objectives, and we will in the next few weeks identify implementation plans for the five areas and then we will start to move on with them.

This is such a novel political object—it's honestly an experiment—that of course success will have to be seen in five or ten years by 2030. If we are successful, we will demonstrate with the missions, starting with finance ministers, that it is worth investing in science and innovation.

It's very hard to make the case for enough investment in research and investment. Canada has done very well and some European countries are also really investing at high levels in research and innovation. But it's not enough. We need to ensure that across governments there is a better understanding that fundamental research and the knowledge it creates, the disruption it creates, applied research, innovation systems—they are all key in creating our future. That is pretty straightforward, but demonstrating it with missions is something different. If we are successful, I would argue that this will then allow for better structures and funding for research and innovation.

The CFI recently received $500 million in the federal budget that partly will go toward research infrastructure. For Roseann, are you seeing more awareness after the pandemic that this needs to be a long-term area to invest in?

Runte: We have just learned a lesson about what we could have done better and what we needed to do better. Last year in the summertime with Dr. Nemer, I undertook a survey of all of the containment facilities in the country to see where we are, what they need to do better and what they need in the case of a future pandemic to have the structures and resources available. In research infrastructure, our job is to make the environment possible for those good ideas to come. To make it possible for the work to happen and for the next generation of scientists to do what they need to do to solve the problems of tomorrow.

I think this is just the start of us continuing to invest in science and research to solve many problems of the world. To look at the environment, to look at other problems in health, in order to look at communications and how we support our population right across the country. And how we work with other countries around the world.

I sound very optimistic and I always am, and that's part of the reason I like Jean-Eric Paquet, because he's also optimistic. He's got a big vision and a dream.

I would like to say that it is not going to be easy. When we talk about sharing data, we need to have protocols and share data in the same way. Not just from one province to another but from one country to another. When we talk about sharing major research facilities, how do we make them available to researchers around the world?

Horizon Europe is a great lynchpin that is going to solve many problems. But it also requires treaties between countries that require much work to make this happen.

I agree that it is hard, because there is a lot of work. If you make the protocol that the data is transparent, you need to invest in that. Investing in something that is practically invisible is not easy. So we have to make the examples of that data real, so that people know that if this data is transparent, we are going to find the cure to the disease that their child has. It is going to solve the problem of this population, or that population.

Both Jean-Eric Paquet and Dr. Roseann O'Reilly Runte will be speaking at the International Conference on Research Infrastructures (ICRI 2021) from June 1 to 3. The conference, hosted by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation with funding from the European Union, brings together policy experts, facility managers, leading researchers and other stakeholders to discuss challenges and emerging trends for research infrastructures around the world.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

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