Building a research infrastructure can be compared to a journey to take, passing through various important stops along the way. What does RESILIENCE’s journey toward a sustainable research infrastructure look like?
In the years leading up to the project, FSCIRE, the leading institution, worked from the vision that Europe needed a dedicated research infrastructure for the study of religions. To turn this vision into reality, the concept focused on building support across the academic community, engaging institutions to join the initiative, and securing funding from the European Commission.
This ambition was driven by major developments and innovations in the study of religions, alongside a growing societal need for reliable, scientifically grounded, actionable knowledge about religion. Quoting Alberto Melloni (FSCIRE): “In the ‘religious climate change’ in which we live, many responses are offered and many challenges are on the stage. What our Research Infrastructure will offer is to use the tool of knowledge. For this reason we are offering services that are interdisciplinary by nature.”
ReIReS was a European project that brought together twelve institutions to design and to lay the foundations for a sustainable research infrastructure for Religious Studies. The project had five key objectives: strengthening the field of historical and religious studies, supporting a new generation of scholars, promoting high-quality and independent research, increasing public understanding of religion’s role in society, and providing research services that benefit academia and wider communities.
ReIReS achieved significant results, including the development of collaborative research tools, the delivery of 12 international training schools and courses, support for research scholarships across 23 countries, and the publication of extensive educational and research materials. It offered the chance to define the community, identify the digital turn taking place in it and start the development of three services: ReIReSearch (a discovery platform), Trans-National Access and Training.
In 2018, the ESFRI Roadmap identified Religious Studies as High Strategic Potential Areas of Research in The Field Of Social And Cultural Innovation “for creating a diachronic understanding of the historical development of religions and for enabling the appropriate elaboration of tools to manage inter-religious stress.”
RESILIENCE 2YSEP was the next station. It allowed RESILIENCE to get closer to its goal and to enter the ESFRI Roadmap in 2021. Many of the documents constituting the backbone of the research infrastructure (e.g. Governance, Access Policy, Service Catalogue, Costbook and financial model) have been developed, offering a sound basis for the preparation of the research infrastructure.
The inclusion of RESILIENCE in the ESFRI Roadmap in 2021 marks an important station in the history of the RESILIENCE infrastructure, because it recognized the maturity of RESILIENCE to enter the European landscape of research infrastructure and it offers to the research infrastructure an opportunity for continuous monitoring and improvement.
A new grant from the EU made it possible to continue the journey. RESILIENCE PPP led to a higher technical and scientific development of the research infrastructure, enjoying a number of synergies at national and European levels, like ITSERR, RELIGIS, GRAPHIA and VEREAD. However, during the past four years some critical issues emerged, which should be finalized before RESILIENCE enters the implementation phase.
The EU grant for the Transition to Implementation Phase allows us to be better prepared for the launch of the infrastructure. From 2026 to 2028, work will focus on the following objectives: Completing the work in order to secure funding by the future members of RESILIENCE ERIC and establishing the RESILIENCE ERIC; enlargement and consolidation of the membership; finalisation of the distributed technical architecture, consolidation of service catalogue; finalization of access policies and users’ strategies.
RESILIENCE is on its way to becoming an ERIC, a European Research Infrastructure Consortium. Then it will be a long-term sustainable infrastructure for research on the study of religions of which European countries are members. This ensures that the services will be available to the academic community and other users for decades to come.