Building Sustainable Infrastructures: Lessons Learnt & Future Directions – Takeaways from a panel discussion

Building Sustainable Infrastructures: Lessons Learnt & Future Directions Takeaways from an international panel discussion 28 August 2025 This paper summarises the main themes raised and the discussions during a high-profile panel at the bi-yearly German CoRDI (Conference on Research Data Infrastructure) on 28 August 2025, as part of Base4NFDI’s annual User Conference. Moderated by Sonja Schimmler and Raphael Ritz, the panel comprised four international experts: Carole Goble, University of Manchester, UK / ELIXIR UK Hilary Hanahoe, Research Data Alliance (RDA) Rosie Hicks, Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Mark van de Sanden, Géant Build connections with your community Base4NFDI is in a critical growth phase where services are starting to mature and come to fruition. Hilary Hanahoe likened infrastructure stewardship to gardening— where nurturing and constant care matter. Sustainability is gained by a long, hard process of: demonstrating benefits and identifying what would be lost without such services, and gaining community trust. Financial and operational sustainability have to go hand in hand with the community. International cooperation— engaging with other organisations and building alliances early—is essential for future-proofing services and for your ‘standing’ in the community. To achieve that, bottom-up (community-driven) and top-down (management-led) approaches need to be balanced. To do so successfully requires active listening and transparent communication. Also remember that your ‘shareholders’ are the community and this should be underpinned by solid service development which can be constructed along the lines of collective ownership, and crossinfrastructure collaboration. This can also spread development risks and support long-term operations. “A big part of the coordination work is securing partnerships, identifying synergies: This helps enormously with sustainability.” Hilary Hanahoe Building Sustainable Infrastructures: Lessons Learnt & Future Directions, 28 August 2025 2 The session presented insights on how research data infrastructures can become robust and sustainable and discussed not just technical, but also organisational and human dimensions. Other issues of interest were: relevance of stakeholder and community work, non-anathema of open science and operational models. 3 Embrace people and teams Rosie Hicks drew on her experience at ARDC to argue that people are the core of infrastructure sustainability. She emphasised that staff, their expertise, and inclusive organisational cultures determine success. Make visible and tenable the collaboration of crucial contributors, and encourage emphasis on positions and titles which in turn reflect substantive roles. Skilling teams around infrastructure development, particularly around the role of developing a product, and product management —and supporting communities where such capabilities are lacking—is essential. One clear challenge and discussion point focused on the critical juncture in any infrastructure development: moving from a project environment to a production environment. One solution is to have collaborations early on with outside players who can solidify the change, by professionalizing procedures. A key take-away is that the development area is different to the operations area, these are two different concepts. Change management is also a factor for sustainability and enduring infrastructures. Embracing and handling change in an ongoing way is also about how to perceive and choose to manage infrastructure. Moving from development to the operational phase requires early, continuous engagement with user communities and funding agencies. “Your staff are the most precious asset of an infrastructure provider: Set the behavioural goals and communicate what success looks like.” Rosie Hicks Credit: Markus Getto, NFDI Office Building Sustainable Infrastructures: Lessons Learnt & Future Directions, 28 August 2025 4 Build effective services people actually want to use As software tools and platforms evolve, standards, formats, and, crucially, APIs remain central to longterm sustainability. Carole Goble highlighted that the focus must extend beyond formal-technical aspects most often reflected-upon. The relationship between the user and developer should build on existing trusted processes in building long-term services, although this heavily depends on wide adoption and active usage. Infrastructure is hidden but also needs to be "visible and loud" to attract usage—unused services risk becoming invisible or obsolete. The panel recommended exploring the implications of not having a given service: what is the cost to a given field, to data creation, to international collaboration. A compelling argument is to focus on the services that no other body can do. Ultimately each service needs to develop a case for investment and to work with business concepts. Finally, work to identify: a) what are the funding streams; b) why should they fund you and what is the challenge you are about to solve. “Quantitative impact and stories are both important: quantitative to get a place at the table but stories and being attuned to the funders’ goals gets the money.” Carole Goble Building Sustainable Infrastructures: Lessons Learnt & Future Directions, 28 August 2025 5 Be idealistic AND businesslike The panelists cautioned against losing open science idealism as infrastructures scale and become more business-like, suggesting a dual focus on hard metrics and human stories to make a persuasive investment case for funders. Mark van de Sanden stressed that sustainability is not just about securing funds, but about defining what truly matters for the future. Both data (metrics, impact) and stories (of human relevance) matter when advocating for sustainability. With hundreds of potential NFDI services, clear criteria must be established to determine which are strategically important and which should be sustained. There is also a need for tough decisions guided by quantitative metrics—especially usage statistics —and meaningful collaboration at a national level. All services have different sustainability criteria and this quantitative impact is important, for example a criterion for each service should be developed: what does success look like, how many researchers are using the service, where are the users and how do we engage them. Remember, not all services will be sustained. The open science community also has a responsibility to make the business case for service development and we have to make the cost transparent, which is the cost of open science. Accordingly, it also needs to be taken into account that developing operational models it is in the interest to have all the community on board as a proactive group to keep the service relevant and serving targeted needs of users. The panelists stressed the importance of preparing compelling, audience-specific narratives and elevator pitches to secure partnerships and funding. Quantitative impact and stories are both important: Quantitative to get a place at the table but stories and being attuned to the funders’ goals gets the money. “Making a case for investment can still encapsulate idealism, you have to combine quantitative metrics and keeping the community on board to sell the story.” Mark van de Sanden Building Sustainable Infrastructures: Lessons Learnt & Future Directions, 28 August 2025 Next Steps Much is currently being invested across the NFDI in developing services and infrastructures. Base4NFDI is in a unique position to establish openly governed infrastructures that stem from and are developed by national infrastructures, service providers, research centres and institutions. The question remains, however, how to develop them for the long-term into successful user-driven services, and how to balance and combine this complex ecosystem of technical components and people, with ongoing commitment and trust from the community it serves. By focusing on these dimensions, infrastructures like Base4NFDI—and the NFDI—can navigate the technical, human, and political landscape required to achieve enduring sustainability. 6 Building Sustainable Infrastructures: Lessons Learnt & Future Directions, 28 August 2025 The Panelists Carole Goble is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester where she leads the e-Science Group of Researchers, Research Software Engineers and Data Stewards. She has 30+ years’ experience of leading digital research infrastructure development, and advancing innovations in research reproducible science, open and FAIR data and method sharing, knowledge and metadata management and computational workflows in a range of disciplines, notably the Life Sciences. Carole is the Joint Head of Node of ELIXIR-UK (28 research performing organisations), the national node of ELIXIR Europe, the European Research infrastructure for Life Science data. Carole is also co-Scientific Director of Federated Analytics for Health Data Research UK, a founder of the UK’s Software Sustainability Institute, and a partner in 10+ projects in the European Open Science Cloud. In 2023 Carole was the PC Chair of the inaugural NFDI conference CoRDI. Hilary Hanahoe is the Secretary General of the global Research Data Alliance (RDA), an international, non-profit, volunteer organisation addressing the need for open and interoperable sharing and re-use of research data and building the social, technical and cross-disciplinary links to enable such sharing and re-use on a global scale. Currently, RDA has a community of over 14,500 individual data professionals from 151 countries collaborating on different open science and open data activities, operating under six fundamental guiding principles of openness, consensus, harmonisation, community-driven, inclusivity, not for profit and technology neutrality. Hilary is responsible for the financial and organisational sustainability of RDA on an international level and is the RDA Foundation CEO. She is passionate about the work of the Research Data Alliance and its vibrant, volunteer community working to enable the open sharing and reuse of data across the globe. Rosie Hicks is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The ARDC is a sector-wide initiative enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to provide Australian researchers with competitive advantage through data. The ARDC’s mission is to accelerate research and innovation by driving excellence in the creation, analysis and retention of high-quality data assets. Rosie has expertise and extensive knowledge of the Australian research infrastructure sector, and leadership experience including as the inaugural CEO of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF). Her career, spanning Japan, UK and Australia, includes every aspect of scientific instrumentation from product development and technical marketing to the management of multi-user facilities, working in environments that cross academic and industry domains. Mark van de Sanden is working at GÉANT as Senior Manager (Research & Data). He has more than 25 years of experience in managing supercomputers, large scale data infrastructures and has been participating in European projects. He is a data and storage expert and has been leading the data services team for more than 10 years. In EUDAT, Mark is a member of the secretariat responsible for strategic service development. He has been involved in many EOSC related projects (e.g. EOSC-Hub, EOSC Future, DICE, FAIRCORE4EOSC, EOSC-ENTRUST, AARC-TREE) and has been member of the EOSC Architecture working group, the EOSC-A task forces on technical interoperability and of the EOSC Federation Handbook writing team. Carole Goble Hilary Hanahoe Rosie Hicks Mark van de Sanden 7 Building Sustainable Infrastructures: Lessons Learnt & Future Directions, 28 August 2025