ELIXIR-CONVERGE D4.2 Updated ELIXIR Long-term Sustainability Plan

The scope of the Deliverable is to update and release ELIXIR’s Long-term Sustainability Plan (LTS Plan), which is now released as a public document, with a DOI (https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1119412.1) and lives on ELIXIR’s F1000 gateway. Financial sustainability is a key topic for the successful operation of all research infrastructures and a clear, public document that describes the nature of the challenge and details the actions to be carried out to address those is crucial. ELIXIR has had a Long-term Sustainability Plan since 2019, and it is periodically updated and refreshed, taking into account new challenges and opportunities, and the completion of time-specific actions. 

The aim of ELIXIR’s Long-term Sustainability Plan is to set out short and long-term actions in order to support the sustainability of ELIXIR’s activities, particularly ELIXIR Nodes and the services they run. There are over 400 services run by ELIXIR Nodes and this plan is not intended to act as or replace the need for those services to develop their own sustainability planning. Rather, the document  focuses on high-level activities that can best support the long-term sustainability of ELIXIR as a whole, i.e. its capacity to maintain its activities over the long term. 

The essential purpose and scope of the LTS Plan has not changed in this update: the scope is focussed on ELIXIR overall, not simply the sustainability of the CONVERGE project outputs, even though the Deliverable is carried out through the CONVERGE project. This is because INFRADEV-3, the topic through which ELIXIR-CONVERGE was funded, is there to support the overall operation of research infrastructures. Therefore the scope of the LTS Plan is ELIXIR overall. Similarly, the LTS Plan remains focussed on financial sustainability, rather than environmental sustainability. Indeed, the major change to the LTS Plan since the previous version has been to restructure the document and actions and to bring them in-line with the recommendations made by the European Commission and ESFRI on Long-term Sustainability of Research Infrastructures. 

Whilst the Deliverable is delayed from the original planned date, work undertaken within ELIXIR in already implementing the actions contained within the LTS Plan has progressed as planned and has indeed remained a higher priority than publishing the final document. For example, now activates focussed on the Sustainability of Nodes through the acquisition of national funding via local roadmaps, and a workshop to bring together ELIXIR partners running services to discuss business models have been prioritised ahead of publishing the LTS plan, as this has a greater impact on ELIXIR overall.