CST Members – Call for Proposals: Impact

Core Scientific Team: Impact

• Notice Type: Call for CST Member
• Issue Date: 10 February 2025
• Closing Date and Time: 04 April 2025, 12pm (BST)
• Call Type: Call for Proposals
• Call Reference Number: Ref: 2025/003
• Call Title: Core Scientific Team: Impact
• Contact Email: Proposals.ESSERIC@city.ac.uk

Details of Call

The ESS ERIC Director seeks to appoint an institution to monitor and seek to improve the impact of the ESS, as one of the institutions of his Core Scientific Team Committee and to lead associated activities in the Work Programme 2025 to 2029.

 Proposals are invited from leading academic or research institutions. The appointed institution will provide an expert to lead on development and execution of a work package on impact. This expert will be a member of the ESS ERIC Director’s Core Scientific Team (CST).

The expert will report directly to the ESS ERIC Director for the effective conduct of the work package.

Background 

Research Infrastructures (RIs) exist to serve large groups of stakeholders, who could not achieve the results produced by the RI without such a collaborative endeavour.

It is therefore crucial for RIs to be able to demonstrate who is using their facility and be able to describe what impact that scientific use is having both within and beyond academia.

This information is required by funders and can also be used to target efforts to produce different or increased impact in future.

Monitoring the impact of the ESS has therefore become an increasingly important role within the infrastructure.

These impact outputs are reported in the ESS annual activity report; used for European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) key performance indicators (KPIs) which feed into the ESFRI landmark review process; and made available for national funding councils. 

Going forward it is also anticipated that they will be used to identify areas where improvements might be encouraged, via targeted actions from the ESS ERIC itself. 

The ESS has been monitoring the academic impact of its data since its inception and over the past decade there has been an increasingly detailed focus. 

The ESS ERIC Director is now seeking to appoint a CST member to undertake activity in this area for the 2025-2029 period. 

The selected CST institution will build on the work that has been done to date whilst seeking to critically review that. 

At the same time, they will ensure that key reporting metrics are retained during the 2025-2029 period. 

The deadline for proposals is 12pm (BST) on Friday 4 April 2025.