RI-VIS D3.4 Summary report and roadmap for future activities

Over the past 12 months, RI-VIS organised three international Research Infrastructure (RI) symposia with colleagues in different world regions: Africa, Latin America and Australia. These symposia were co-organised with local organising committees, and held over 2-3 days in February, June and October 2021, respectively. In addition, together with the CREMLINplus project, a one-day Europe-Russian Federation symposium on RIs was organised in December 2021. Initially planned as in-person events, the symposia were organised as virtual symposia, due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and related travel restrictions. The attendees had various opportunities to interact with the speakers, panellists and other attendees from the different regions and fields of sciences and to exchange ideas, to network and discuss potentially new collaborations. The speakers and attendees represented RIs, science policy organisations and research institutions from Europe and the other world regions, and were drawn together by a common interest in RIs and international RI cooperation. Prior to the symposia, RI-VIS produced three white papers, which provide recommendations on how to increase collaboration between European RIs and counterparts from Africa, Latin America and Australia. The papers collate the insights of a total of 21 experts from RIs, policy-makers and relevant governmental institutions from the three regions collected through in-depth interviews. Furthermore, RI-VIS drafted guidelines for the effective communication in Africa and Latin America. The symposia were useful in bringing together relevant stakeholders and provide a forum to discuss new or strengthen existing partnerships as well as common challenges and opportunities. The organisers of these international symposia gained valuable experience, in particular with the various formats (e.g., panel discussions, sessions with oral presentations, keynote lectures, thematic satellite workshops, networking sessions) and virtual tools (e.g., Wonder app, Whova platform) to encourage the attendees to actively contribute to the discussions and to stimulate the communication and networking among the attendees before, during and after the symposium. These lessons will be valuable for the organisation of future RI symposia. In fact, the responses of the attendees to our post-symposium survey confirmed that there is a strong interest to organise similar symposia in the future. Future events would help to follow up on the discussions of the RI-VIS meetings in 2021 and to continue the efforts to bring the RIs from different world regions closer together. This summary report and roadmap for future activities will describe the main take-home messages of the RI-VIS symposia and outline recommendations for future activities. Several case studies are described in this deliverable to illustrate in more detail how RI-VIS contributed to advance the collaboration between individual European RIs and their RI counterparts in other region