Building on the clusters under Horizon 2020and Horizon Europe, on the development of catalogues of services, and on new access pathways and improved services such as under Horizon Europe INFRASERV projects, proposals should address all of the following aspects:

• Strengthening the representation of the research infrastructures cluster, as a single or coordinated voice, in key EU policy developments and strategic initiatives and contribute to policies in their domain with a research infrastructure component. Coordination with cross-domains fora, such as the ERIC Forum and EIROforum should also be ensured.
• Strengthening coordination among research infrastructures to foster complementarities, interoperability, harmonisation, integration and synergies within the domain, and where relevant with other domains to address increasingly complex and multidisciplinary science and technology challenges.
• Developing, optimising and connecting catalogues of research infrastructures services of European interest. Attention is required to new users, notably researchers and innovators from widening countries and candidate countries, industry (including SMEs, startups and scaleups), early-stage career researchers, and non-expert users. Flexibility to address future needs should be considered.
• Developing and implementing intermediary services, user support, tools and notably AI assisted research infrastructure services navigation. When relevant, resulting data and digital services should be made accessible through EOSC.
• Elaborating and promoting indicators flagging the strategic relevance of specific research infrastructures services to key EU R&I priorities and initiatives, including through common or coordinated impact assessments, and possible validation mechanisms with these initiatives.

Proposals should involve, not necessarily as beneficiaries, ESFRI Landmarks and Projects and/or ERICs in the domain, other research infrastructures that are international European research organisations and, where relevant, well-established networks of key European research infrastructures open to external users. Proposals should elaborate on which key EU priorities and initiatives (such as Horizon Europe partnerships, missions) they will consider and the nature and objectives of the envisaged coordination mechanisms or joint activities.

To ensure a holistic view from design to implementation of possible access schemes, proposals should ensure strong and continuous collaboration with the cross-domain preparatory action exploring a more integrated and sustainable scheme for access to research infrastructures HORIZON-INFRA-2025-01-DEV-05, and the actions supported under topics HORIZON-INFRA-2027-01-SERV-01 and HORIZON-INFRA-2027-01-SERV-02. This collaboration should ensure a common front page to all above actions highlighting the common objectives of EU supported access, the main conditions and requirements, providing preliminary guidance on access opportunities and directing to the single-entry point portal of each pilot of HORIZON-INFRA-2027-SERV-01-01. The collaboration should also promote simplified access pathways, good practices on call conditions, converging access modalities and selection process, and effective governance of the set of projects acting as an access programme with appropriate advisory bodies.

Proposals could consider the inclusion of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) research infrastructures in the area of health and food. In that respect, the JRC will consider collaborating with any successful proposal and this collaboration, when relevant, should be established after the proposal’s approval.