Background: a new ERA for research and innovation
Since its inception in 2000, the European Research Area (ERA) has proven to be an important cornerstone of research across the EU. With the ambition to create a market for research, innovation and technology in Europe, as well as aligning research policies and programmes, ERA provided a significant boost for the scientific landscape. However, progress has slowed down over the years. To regain momentum and offer a response to several global challenges, the European Commission (EC) formulated a new level of ambition as part of its communication “A new ERA for research and innovation”. Aiming to deepen ERA, boost R&I for society and the economy, as well as improve overall excellence, the new ERA is built along the goals described by the 2022-2024 ERA policy agenda. These goals mark key strategic areas for the European R&I ecosystem and outline further improvements to be achieved through twenty actions.
Source of image: Presentation of DG Research and Innovation at the Meeting of the Steering Platforms in Skopje, 2023
aUPaEU in the footsteps of the ERA policy agenda
As a reader and follower of the aUPaEU project, you may find yourself wondering “This is great, but how does this relate to Agora?” It is true that the overall methodology of the aUPaEU project follows a bottom-up approach, leveraging conversations with alliances to design tangible and tested services to address specific R&I challenges and create added value for users of Agora. Nonetheless, it is important to bear in mind that Agora’s acceleration services address six major areas, which comprise 1) Infrastructure and resource sharing, 2) Boosting researcher careers, 3) Improving R&I collaboration between academia and industry, 4) Open Science, 5) Involving societal organisations and citizens, and 6) Gender equality. If these dimensions sound familiar, it is probably because they are all directly related to different objectives of the ERA policy agenda. Let us take a closer look at these connections.
Improving Resource, infrastructure and capacity sharing is not just a priority for aUPaEU, but is also enshrined in the ERA Policy Agenda (Action: #8 Strengthen sustainability, accessibility and resilience of research infrastructures in the ERA). The proactive opening of research infrastructures is not yet common practice and requires adequate tools to register and list these resources, making them findable and accessible. Agora’s Research Infrastructure Catalogue is a powerful service to enable alliances to do exactly that.
Boosting researcher careers is another common objective of aUPaEU and the ERA policy agenda (Action: #4: Promote attractive and sustainable research careers, balanced talent circulations and international, transdisciplinary and intersectoral mobility across the ERA). Internship services and other tools for matchmaking on Agora are just the starting point of aUPaEU’s efforts to introduce meaningful contributions to this ambition.
Our aim to support collaboration between academia and industry is guided by the respective goals of the ERA to enhance knowledge valorisation (Action: #7, e.g. Code of Practice for smart use of IP) and facilitate European Partnerships with public and private entities to pool resources and align goals (Action: #10). While Agora, again, presents itself as potent collaborative platform for this purpose due to its flexibility in design different levels of access, it is important to stress that, ultimately, HEIs and alliances need to be able to maintain agency over the platform.
The EC acknowledges the importance of Open Science primarily through its initiative of setting up a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC, Action #1: Enable the open sharing of knowledge and the re-use of research outputs). While Agora does not yet have dedicated services in this area (unless you would also – and rightfully – count research infrastructure sharing via the Catalogue to be a part of Open Science). Yet, given the broad spectrum of resources that could be shared via the platform, Agora has the potential to become an alliance-scale addition to EOSC’s “system of systems” approach.
Given alliances using Agora are interested in involving citizens and societal organisations in their platforms, aUPaEU is eager to explore services in this area. In line with the policy agenda (Action #14: Bring science closer to citizens), Agora aims to support HEIs and alliances in reaching out to local stakeholders, communities and social environments.
The last one of aUPaEU’s major areas for service creation is gender equality in line with the ERA’s commitment to gender equality and inclusiveness (Action #5). The Digital Gender Equality Actions Repository is just one example of services to be tested and potentially included as part of Agora on this topic. This way, the platform will also support the Ljubljana Declaration on Gender Equality in Research and Innovation.
It becomes obvious that Agora, at its current stage of development, addresses these areas to a varying degree, which is only logical given that different services are at different levels of maturity. Nonetheless, aUPaEU is committed to support institutional transformation and acceleration with services for all of the aforementioned areas.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that, despite of the six major areas being strong drivers of service development and testing, they are far from exhaustive and Agora’s offers are not necessarily limited by these topics. Indeed, we can already see indirect potentials of platform services in other areas of the ERA policy agenda. Take the ERA’s ambition towards the reform of research assessment, for instance (Action#3: Advance towards the reform the assessment for research, researchers and institutions to improve their quality, performance and impact), which can be supported by tracking a broad range of outputs and contributions, including service provision such as mentoring, resource sharing or other forms of collaboration. Furthermore, the EC’s current efforts to acknowledge, promote and professionalise research management (Action #17) may very well benefit from Agora as a tool for research and innovation management on the level of HEI alliances, for example in the form of technical platform management via the CRM or supervision of concrete services. And let us not forget the goal to empower HEIs and supporting them in their digital transition (Action #13), which could very well be considered as an overarching objective of aUPaEU and a challenge we chose to address by providing Agora as a powerful digital tool to support HEI alliances.
Moving forward
In May 2025, the Council of the EU endorsed the ERA policy agenda for 2025-2027. The previous area policy agenda and its guidance for the work of aUPaEU will largely be continued, as its previous actions and ambitions remain as relevant as before. The new ERA is here to stay, and aUPaEU will leverage alliance Agoras to support its acceleration, integration and overall interoperability. Our development of suitable services to support institutional transition will proceed to be bottom-up, driven and tested by users. But be sure that these developments will not happen in a vacuum, as we continue to follow and support the vision of the new ERA.