As the field has developed, so has the complexity of the accelerator facilities and detectors. Many modern accelerator facilities are now at the stage where they are too large for university groups and instead are housed in national research centres. Generally these facilities attract international user groups. Similarly the detectors are now so complex that their cost and technical demands often require the finance and expertise from several international groups for their construction and operation.

Europe currently operates a complementary set of facilities for nuclear structure and hadron physics, which are networked by two Integrated Infrastructure Initiatives (I3’s) funded in FP6. These are operated by national laboratories or universities and over the next decade a number of these will see major upgrades. Within Europe the challenge is to merge the national programmes in Nuclear Physics in order to create a stronger and more cohesive research activity which is truly European in scope. To achieve this, two conditions are required:

Firstly, an independent assessment must be made of the field, highlighting the growth areas and identifying the key technical and instrument developments that are required to address these. Europe is fortunate that the first of these conditions is already covered. NuPECC (Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee), an Expert Committee of the ESF (European Science Foundation), plays a crucial role in providing independent views on the direction of nuclear physics within Europe, in the form of periodic Forward Looks (Long-Range Plans). Over a number of years, NuPECC has gained the respect of the European nuclear physics community, and its authority is now recognised by the Commission, the national Funding Agencies and, most recently, by ESFRI (European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructures).

Secondly, the current funding procedures, where groups are funded by separate national funding agencies that reflect national priorities, have to be given a strategic direction to help align some of the national decisions to the common goals.

What is required now is that Europe puts in place a mechanism to meet this second condition, the effective co-ordination of national funding procedures to meet the common agreed priorities on infrastructure and R&D investment. This ERA-NET proposal aims to meet this challenge.

Indeed, through the NuPECC Forward Look process Europe has an effective mechanism for identifying the growth areas and opportunities in nuclear physics research and the facilities and instruments required to achieve these, Europe lacks an effective mechanism to coordinate national funding resources to achieve these identified goals. The aim of the ERA-NET is to provide this mechanism by enabling the national funding agencies to come together to find ways to pool resources for the projects (new facilities or instrumentation) to which each country intends to participate.

The ESFRI roadmap has paved the way towards a better coordination of funding for the Research Infrastructures of pan-European interest, which today focuses particularly on FAIR and SPIRAL 2 for nuclear physics. The concerned funding agencies shall act pro-actively vis-à-vis the new European context of ESFRI.. As ESFRI foresees a continuous process of updating pan-European research infrastructures, the work to be done in the NuPNET project will also play a positive role through an improved European coordination of the programmes which may lead to projects that will be included in the revised roadmaps of ESFRI.