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Reading it black on white is just wonderful:

“COMMISSION IMPLEMENTING DECISION (EU) 2015/2097 of 26 October 2015 on setting up the Integrated Carbon Observation System European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ICOS ERIC)”

This means that 9 European countries have united to build a long-term research infrastructure on greenhouse gases and achieved a legal form for this. It also means that we have finalized a 10 years construction process that needed patience, diplomacy and the will to compromise. The result shows how strong and resilient the ICOS community is.

Whoever has run a long-distance race knows that the final lap is very special: you see the line and although exhausted from the long way behind, you mobilize all remaining power for the finish. On 1st September we entered the final lap on our long-distance race for ICOS ERIC: the European Commission and the national governments of eight founding countries agreed on a final version of the statutes of ICOS ERIC which were then given to the translation process into all official EU languages. In a few weeks we can expect a written procedure by the Commission to put ICOS ERIC into place.

Dorothee Bakker, Kim Currie, Peter Landschützer, Are Olsen and Christian Rödenbeck on the SOCAT and SOCOM event on 7 September 2015 at the SOLAS Open Science Conference in Kiel, Germany.

A few weeks ago I had the honour to open the kickoff meeting of the cluster project ENVRIplus. In my speech I used game theory to explain cooperation in a competitive world. It was a response to a colleague’s remark that cooperatively seeking for common solutions among or inside research infrastructures is a naive do-gooder’s undertaking in a shark pool. Indeed, if we follow game theory we can come to the conclusion that being always cooperative is not the most successful strategy.

“Research Infrastructures of pan-European relevance provide unique opportunities for world-class research and training as well as to stimulate knowledge and technology transfer, in brief for European capacity building.” (ESFRI Roadmap document)

Research Infrastructures that have been identified during the ESFRI roadmap process should have a lot of properties. One of them that is always stressed is scientific excellence. However:

What is excellent science? Can we manage excellence?