The Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) is an international multi-site research infrastructure that will provide access to the most multifunctional of all existing and projected laser facilities, with a collection of the most powerful, most intense and shortest-pulsed systems in the world. ELI's core mission will be to open up new interdisciplinary research opportunities with the light from these lasers and the secondary radiation derived from them in a number of areas ranging from materials sciences, to medical applications, astrophysics in the lab, high-energy physics.
ELI consists of three facilities located in Central and Eastern Europe representing an overall investment volume exceeding 850M€m stemming from the European Regional Development Funds (ERDF) and national funding. The ELI Facilities are nearing completion and their initial operations, due to start in the course of 2019, will be managed in an integrated way under a single European Research Infrastructure (ELI ERIC).
The ELI Facilities are designed not only to serve researchers who specialize in laser science, but they will also accommodate researchers from other fields as well as industrial users. With this variety in research activities, ELI is expected to deliver significant societal benefits and drive innovation in the medium and long term, including improved oncology treatment (ion radiation beams), medical and biomedical imaging, a new generation of photonics and the development of new methods of nuclear waste processing through transmutation.
The ELITRANS project was designed to address the challenges involved in the transition from the implementation of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) by three separate legal entities to operations under a single ELI ERIC. More specifically, most of the dimensions that need to be tackled to create a new organization or, as in the case of ELI, merge three autonomous organizations into one are addressed by the project: governance, management, organization, legal, financial, technical, communication and even cultural aspects of the “integrated ELI” are all addressed by ELITRANS, and defining the means and the schedule to implement changes was also part of the project scope.
The initial scope of the project was to complement the final implementation stage – parallel to the completion of the three construction sites – by preparing and undertaking the transformation from three legally independent construction projects towards governance, operation and financing under a single international legal entity, ELI ERIC.
In this context, three objectives were defined:
• Objective 1 – Developing concepts for ELI ERIC’s “business model”, including essential elements of the future ELI ERIC access policy, services to users and specialized experiment preparation services, scientific standards, terms of services, and IP policy;
• Objective 2 – Preparing ELI ERIC’s “business plan”, adapted to the operation as the world’s first international laser user facility, including organization, legal constitution, financial sustainability, governance, corporate-wide concepts for a virtual research and management environment (VRME), Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) regulations, computing and big-data management;
• Objective 3 – Preparing and undertaking the merger of formally independent national construction projects towards one unified research infrastructure of pan-European importance. This includes steps towards the transformation and unification of ELI’s internal structures and organizational procedures, the creation of an internal corporate identity, harmonization and unification of international relations, creation of a common scientific profile and competitive set of user research opportunities.
