In a brief report published in EPJ Research Infrastructures, researchers Riccardo Crescenzi, Charlotte Glass, Patricia Postigo McLaughlin, and José Luis Martínez Peña examine how socio-economic evidence can support strategic choices for public investment in Big Science without reducing discovery-led research to short-term accounting. The authors argue that while large-scale scientific investment has historically been justified primarily by its direct contributions to scientific discovery, the political economy surrounding these major public commitments has undergone fundamental structural shifts. To address these evolving conditions, the economic case for public investment in Big Science, mediated through research infrastructures, must be systematically reframed around capability formation, excellent science, European coordination, and system-wide impacts. Central to this strategic reorientation are three vital transitions: shifting the focus from narrow national returns to European value added, moving from isolated facility-level assessments to coordinated portfolio-level strategies, and transitioning from one-off impact studies to comprehensive life-cycle evaluations across every development phase.
The analytical urgency behind this reframing stems from an increasingly constrained political-economic environment in which governments face mounting fiscal pressures alongside rising scientific ambitions. Public budgets have become tighter, complex scientific instrumentation has grown substantially more costly, and energy and environmental constraints have become far more visible as large-scale installations consume significant resources and face demands to demonstrate ecological responsibility. Simultaneously, intensifying geopolitical fragmentation has elevated domestic and regional technological capabilities into explicit, high-priority policy concerns. Ministers operating within comparatively short fiscal and electoral cycles increasingly require credible evidence that costly facilities with decades-long planning horizons can deliver broad, tangible benefits for citizens, industrial enterprises, and territories. The authors stress that the core analytical challenge is emphatically not to defend science purely through commercial or economic metrics. Rather, the objective is to establish an economic justification that remains rigorous, proportionate, and faithful to the foundational public-good character of open, discovery-oriented scientific inquiry.
This heightened attention to the economics of Big Science mirrors deep structural transformations within the modern innovation landscape. Contemporary innovation has grown progressively science-based, cumulative, and collective, with patent evidence demonstrating that inventions positioned closer to frontier scientific knowledge consistently yield greater economic and technological value. High-impact science and technology now rely decisively on collaborative teams rather than individual inventors, requiring specialized human capital, intricate machinery, and dense cross-disciplinary interactions. Yet this dynamic introduces a profound economic paradox. Even as scientific research becomes more critical for technological progress, major corporations appear increasingly unwilling to conduct open scientific research within their internal laboratories. While corporate research and development continues, private laboratories have substantially weakened their basic scientific orientation, leaving commercial enterprises more reliant on discoveries generated within public and semi-public institutions. Furthermore, new ideas are becoming demonstrably harder to find, requiring larger research teams, prolonged academic training, and ever more sophisticated technical equipment.
These mounting operational constraints have elevated research infrastructures to the center of broader European policy debates on productivity, resilience, and industrial competitiveness. High-level strategic assessments, including the Draghi report, frame research and technological innovation as indispensable pillars of European competitiveness and strategic autonomy, underscoring the crucial role of expensive equipment and coordinated political capital. Complementing this perspective, the Letta report advocates establishing a fifth freedom within the European Single Market dedicated specifically to research, innovation, knowledge, and education to ensure deeper integration fosters future prosperity. These policy discussions are further magnified by shifting geopolitical dynamics, where investments in research facilities are tightly bound to data governance, supply-chain resilience, and technological sovereignty. While international survey data indicate that public trust in scientists remains moderately high across countries, this broad aggregate confidence masks notable geographic, social, and political fractures, meaning that general public goodwill does not automatically translate into sustained political backing amid intense competition for scarce public funds.
Europe provides a uniquely instructive setting for examining these dynamics because the geographic sources of funding and the geographic distribution of societal benefits rarely align. Major European research facilities are typically funded through national budgetary allocations, yet their scientific and economic dividends diffuse across transnational user communities, cross-border procurement networks, data repositories, and highly mobile researchers. This institutional architecture has deep historical roots preceding formal European Union integration. Beginning with early post-war initiatives and the 1978 establishment of the Joint European Torus as a Euratom Joint Undertaking, large-scale scientific collaboration actively helped construct European partnership. The Single European Act subsequently provided an explicit treaty basis to strengthen the scientific and technological foundations of European industry and encourage cross-border cooperation between firms, research centers, and universities. This legal foundation enabled the growth of a coordinated European infrastructure policy alongside established intergovernmental bodies including CERN, the European Southern Observatory, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.
To manage tensions between national accountability and collective European benefits, Europe relies on a flexible architecture of variable geometry where individual countries contribute selectively based on their scientific priorities, fiscal capacities, and strategic interests. Coordination mechanisms such as joint technology development, life-cycle roadmapping, and transnational access allow participating states to pool expertise, eliminate unnecessary duplication, and widen institutional access without imposing full centralization. Transnational access acts essentially as an Erasmus-style single market for research infrastructure users, enabling leading investigators to utilize premier facilities regardless of whether their home country hosts them. The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures Roadmap, inaugurated in 2006, expanded to encompass 63 facilities of pan-European relevance by 2021, with its 2026 update scheduled for launch in Rome. Furthermore, the European Commission has proposed contributing up to twenty percent of construction costs for critical new research and technology infrastructures under the next Framework Programme, signaling a major transition toward shared capital responsibility.
A core conceptual insight emphasized by the authors is that Big Science must be analyzed as an integrated system of impacts rather than a collection of isolated physical installations. Research infrastructures generate multifaceted benefits encompassing publications, datasets, computational architectures, technical training, and environmental innovations that disperse across expansive networks of suppliers, users, and educational systems. Industrial procurement represents one of the most visible interfaces between frontier science and the broader economy, generating effects that extend far beyond contract values or internal supplier employment. For example, empirical research on the procurement of superconducting radio-frequency cavities for the European X-ray Free Electron Laser demonstrated that while the contract created approximately thirty direct jobs within the supplier firm E. Zanon, it supported an estimated 445 additional manufacturing jobs in the surrounding municipality of Schio, Italy, compared to a synthetic counterfactual. Such robust counterfactual evaluations prove essential for identifying genuine additionality rather than mere correlation, particularly within regions undergoing industrial decline.
To capture these distributed socio-economic benefits, the authors propose an evaluation framework operating simultaneously across three interconnected tiers: the facility level, the national level, and the European level. At the facility level, evaluation must document specific scientific, technological, and societal capabilities; at the national level, it must assess alignment with domestic skills and existing public investments; and at the European level, it must measure the collective value added through transnational access and specialized coordination. Achieving coherence across this diverse institutional landscape requires avoiding simplistic, one-size-fits-all metrics or aggregate monetary scores that inappropriately flatten distinctions between particle accelerators, synchrotrons, neutron sources, and high-performance computing centers. This balanced methodology aligns with recent institutional guidance, including the UK National Audit Office March 2026 recommendation that research infrastructure be managed cohesively as an integrated portfolio, as well as the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council practice of employing mixed-methods, theory-based evaluations that preserve facility nuances while addressing broader portfolio questions.
Rigorous evaluation must also follow the entire research infrastructure life cycle, tracking developments from initial concepts and engineering design through construction, operational service, periodic major upgrades, and eventual decommissioning. The authors point out that early preparatory evaluations should rigorously interrogate scientific need, governance structures, and expected impact pathways, while operational assessments must measure access equity, data services, and wider spillover effects. However, the timing of evaluation is inherently intertwined with the political economy of funding cycles. Policymakers frequently demand immediate evidence of impact before complex socio-economic benefits have sufficient time to materialize, or mandate burdensome indicator reporting that generates minimal substantive insight. Tracking EU-funded researchers across infrastructure networks remains technically challenging, as complete user datasets for European framework programmes typically become available only years after programme completion due to late-stage grant signings and project extensions during facility maintenance. Consequently, advanced analytical tools like artificial intelligence must be guided by human expertise and robust conceptual clarity.
The report concludes with five targeted recommendations and identifies critical knowledge gaps to guide future science policy. First, socio-economic evidence must enrich and complement scientific excellence rather than displacing it with narrow industrial criteria. Second, investment strategies must formally value specialized peripheral capabilities, such as radiation-hardness testing for space technologies or medical radioisotope production, which bolster technological sovereignty and mission-critical resilience even when secondary to primary scientific missions. Third, funding bodies should mandate a minimum shared evidence base across facilities, covering baseline tracking, procurement paths, and workforce mobility. Fourth, roadmaps must explicitly apply portfolio tests examining complementarity, capability gaps, and benefit distributions. Finally, evaluation mechanisms and baseline data collection must be integrated from the project outset rather than retrofitted following major capital allocations. Addressing existing knowledge gaps regarding additionality, impact interactions, and option value will ultimately ensure that the political capital sustaining European Big Science rests on evidence that is analytically rigorous, strategically focused, and enduringly grounded.
Subject of Research: Socio-economic evaluation and European coordination of Big Science research infrastructures
Article Title: Big Science as Strategic Infrastructure: European Coordination, Public Value and Socio-economic Evidence
Article References: Crescenzi, R., Glass, C., McLaughlin, P. P., & Martínez Peña, J. L. (2026). Big Science as Strategic Infrastructure: European Coordination, Public Value and Socio-economic Evidence. EPJ Research Infrastructures, 10(1), Article 39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41781-026-00193-4
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s41781-026-00193-4
Keywords: Big Science, Research Infrastructures, European Coordination, Socio-economic Impact, Innovation Policy, Public Investment, ESFRI, Technology Infrastructures, Science, Strategic, Infrastructure, European
Source: bioengineer.org
