A fast-paced policy context is characteristic of energy and climate research, which strives to develop solutions to wicked problems such as climate change. Funding agencies in the European Union recognize the importance of linking research and policy in climate and energy research. This calls for an increased understanding of how stakeholder engagement can effectively be used to co-design research questions that include stakeholders' concerns. This paper reviews the current literature on stakeholder engagement, from which we create a set of criteria. These are used to critically assess recent and relevant papers on stakeholder engagement in climate and energy projects. We obtained the papers from a scoping review of stakeholder engagement through workshops in EU climate and energy research. With insights from the literature and current EU climate and energy projects, we developed a workshop programme for stakeholder engagement. This programme was applied to the European Climate and Energy Modelling Forum project, aiming to co-design the most pressing and urgent research questions according to European stakeholders. The outcomes include 82 co-designed and ranked research questions f
In this paper, we focus on a rare scholarly theme of highly productive academics, statistically confirming their pivotal role in knowledge production across 11 systems studied. The upper 10 % of highly productive academics in 11 European countries studied (N=17,211) provide on average almost half of all academic knowledge production. In contrast to dominating bibliometric studies of research productivity, we focus on academic attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions as predictors of becoming research top performers across European systems. Our paper provides a (large-scale and cross-country) corroboration of the systematic inequality in knowledge production, for the first time argued for by Lotka and de Solla Price. We corroborate the deep academic inequality in science and explore this segment of the academic profession. The European research elite is a highly homogeneous group of academics whose high research performance is driven by structurally similar factors, mostly individual rather than institutional. Highly productive academics are similar from a cross-national perspective, and they substantially differ intra-nationally from their lower-performing colleagues.
Major European Union-funded research infrastructure and open science projects have traditionally included dissemination work, for mostly one-way communication of the research activities. Here we present and review our radical re-envisioning of this work, by directly engaging citizen science volunteers into the research. We summarise the citizen science in the Horizon-funded projects ASTERICS (Astronomy ESFRI and Research Infrastructure Clusters) and ESCAPE (European Science Cluster of Astronomy and Particle Physics ESFRI Research Infrastructures), engaging hundreds of thousands of volunteers in providing millions of data mining classifications. Not only does this have enormously more scientific and societal impact than conventional dissemination, but it facilitates the direct research involvement of what is often arguably the most neglected stakeholder group in Horizon projects, the science-inclined public. We conclude with recommendations and opportunities for deploying crowdsourced data mining in the physical sciences, noting that the primary goal is always the fundamental research question; if public engagement is the primary goal to optimise, then other, more targeted approache
The European Research and Development for Space based High Contrast Imaging II Workshop, held at MPIA in May 2025, advanced Europe strategic coordination in support of future exoplanet imaging missions such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets mission. Building on the first 2024 workshop, this meeting defined concrete priorities across eight technical areas, including wavefront sensing, coronagraphs, post processing, nulling interferometry, deformable mirrors, detectors, and telescope design. Discussions emphasized Europe strengths in adaptive optics, ground-based facilities, and interferometry, while identifying key gaps, particularly the need for a dedicated European vacuum testbed for high contrast imaging. The community highlighted near infrared or UV coronagraphy as a promising domain for European leadership and called for joint development of advanced data reduction algorithms, detectors, and cross-mission coordination with HWO and LIFE. The workshop outcomes establish a collaborative roadmap to strengthen Europe technological readiness, foster agency partnerships, and ensure its continued leadership in the next generation of space-b
This document represents a contribution of the United States early career collider physics community to the 2025--2026 update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics. Preferences with regard to different future collider options and R&D priorities were assessed via a survey. The early career community was defined as anyone who is a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, untenured faculty member, or research scientist under 40 years of age. In total, 105 participants responded to the survey between February and March 10th, 2025. Questions were formulated primarily to gauge the enthusiasm and preferences for different collider options in line with the recommendations of the United States' P5 report, relevant to the European Strategy Update.
This document is submitted as input to the European Strategy for Particle Physics Update (ESPPU). The U.S.-based Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) aims at understanding how the complex dynamics of confined quarks and gluons makes up nucleons, nuclei and all visible matter, and determines their macroscopic properties. In April 2024, the EIC project received approval for critical-decision 3A (CD-3A) allowing for Long-Lead Procurement, bringing its realization another step closer. The ePIC Collaboration was established in July 2022 around the realization of a general purpose detector at the EIC. The EIC is based in U.S.A. but is characterized as a genuine international project. In fact, a large group of European scientists is already involved in the EIC community: currently, about a quarter of the EIC User Group (consisting of over 1500 scientists) and 29% of the ePIC Collaboration (consisting of $\sim$1000 members) is based in Europe. This European involvement is not only an important driver of the EIC, but can also be beneficial to a number of related ongoing and planned particle physics experiments at CERN. In this document, the connections between the scientific questions addressed at C
The aim of this paper is to present the impact achieved by Frascati Scienza Association on society and research through the European Researchers' Night project funded by the European Commission within the years 2006-2015. The project has been devoted to raise awareness of researchers' work, encourage the dialogue between researchers and citizens and the choice of young people to pursue a career in science. The first scientific activities and cultural events took shape in 2006, under the coordination of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), through the European Researchers' Night project, the most important and significant event to promote the role of the researcher and bring people of all ages closer to the scientific world. The positive and successful experience of the first two events, pushed the researchers and citizens of Frascati, where most of Italian research centers and infrastructures are located, to formally associate in the Frascati Scienza in 2008, who started to coordinate the event from 2008. Frascati Scienza was driven by the need to promote educational activities to citizens, young people and schools, in order to involve the general public in science an
Oral history is about oral sources of witnesses and commentors on historical events. Speech technology is an important instrument to process such recordings in order to obtain transcription and further enhancements to structure the oral account In this contribution we address the transcription portal and the webservices associated with speech processing at BAS, speech solutions developed at LINDAT, how to do it yourself with Whisper, remaining challenges, and future developments.
This paper presents a scientometric analysis of research output from the University of Lagos, focusing on the two decades spanning 2004 to 2023. Using bibliometric data retrieved from the Web of Science, we examine trends in publication volume, collaboration patterns, citation impact, and the most prolific authors, departments, and research domains at the university. The study reveals a consistent increase in research productivity, with the highest publication output recorded in 2023. Health Sciences, Engineering, and Social Sciences are identified as dominant fields, reflecting the university's interdisciplinary research strengths. Collaborative efforts, both locally and internationally, show a positive correlation with higher citation impact, with the United States and the United Kingdom being the leading international collaborators. Notably, open-access publications account for a significant portion of the university's research output, enhancing visibility and citation rates. The findings offer valuable insights into the university's research performance over the past two decades, providing a foundation for strategic planning and policy formulation to foster research excellence
Scholars are yet to make optimal use of Oral History collections. For the uptake of digital research tools in the daily working practice of researchers, practices and conventions commonly adhered to in the subfields in the humanities should be taken into account during development. To this end, in the Oral History Today project a research tool for exploring Oral History collections is developed in close collaboration with scholarly researchers. This paper describes four stages of scholarly research and the first steps undertaken to incorporate requirements of these stages in a digital research environment.
Since twelve years the researchers of the Roman area organize the European Researchers' Night, a project funded by European Commission to discover science and meet researchers through an Europe-wide public event dedicated to fun learning. Since the first edition in 2006, when the National Laboratory of INFN's in Frascati hosted 4000 visitors the project is always grown up to 50,000 attendees and more than 50 scientific partners. In the last edition, The Frascati Scienza association, which was born to coordinate the event, operated in over 30 Italian cities from south to north of the peninsula. In addition, the Made in Science project - European Research Week 2016/17 - has been the one of the largest project funded by the European Commission and it's often referred to as a model for organization and communication to the general public. The 12 yeas data collected and results obtained, as well as some of the most important experiences in public communication of science will be shown.
Demographic data collection is essential in education research, as demographic data allows researchers to better describe the participant population they study and to contextualize findings. However, current research practices for neurodiversity demographics often rely on prescriptive methods (e.g., requiring participants to report official diagnoses) rather than allowing participants to self-identify. This approach can: a) not allow participants to express their intersecting identities in ways that are authentic; and b) limit trustworthiness and reliability of the data and interpretation. In addition, inconsistent dissemination and representation of demographic data across studies hinder the accessibility and usability of this work. Through a literature review of neurodivergent student experiences with learning and performing STEM, we identified widespread discrepancies in how demographic information is collected and reported. This paper explores how neurodivergent identities can be more accurately and inclusively represented in education research. We present findings of a thematic analysis on the ways neurodivergent demographic data collection is done in the literature using data
This scientometric study analyzes Avian Influenza research from 2014 to 2023 using bibliographic data from the Web of Science database. We examined publication trends, sources, authorship, collaborative networks, document types, and geographical distribution to gain insights into the global research landscape. Results reveal a steady increase in publications, with high contributions from Chinese and American institutions. Journals such as PLoS One and the Journal of Virology published the highest number of studies, indicating their influence in this field. The most prolific institutions include the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Hong Kong, while the College of Veterinary Medicine at South China Agricultural University emerged as the most productive department. China and the USA lead in publication volume, though developed nations like the United Kingdom and Germany exhibit a higher rate of international collaboration. "Articles" are the most common document type, constituting 84.6% of the total, while "Reviews" account for 7.6%. This study provides a comprehensive view of global trends in Avian Influenza research, emphasizing the need for collaborative efforts ac
Why does an argument end up in the final court decision? Was it deliberated or questioned during the oral hearings? Was there something in the hearings that triggered a particular judge to write a dissenting opinion? Despite the availability of the final judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), none of these legal research questions can currently be answered as the ECHR's multilingual oral hearings are not transcribed, structured, or speaker-attributed. We address this fundamental gap by presenting LaCour!, the first corpus of textual oral arguments of the ECHR, consisting of 154 full hearings (2.1 million tokens from over 267 hours of video footage) in English, French, and other court languages, each linked to the corresponding final judgment documents. In addition to the transcribed and partially manually corrected text from the video, we provide sentence-level timestamps and manually annotated role and language labels. We also showcase LaCour! in a set of preliminary experiments that explore the interplay between questions and dissenting opinions. Apart from the use cases in legal NLP, we hope that law students or other interested parties will also use LaCour! as
The Proton Improvement Plan (PIP-II) to the FNAL accelerator chain and the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will provide the world's most intense neutrino beam to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) enabling a wide-ranging physics program. This document outlines the significant contributions made by European national laboratories and institutes towards realizing the first phase of the project with a 1.2 MW neutrino beam. Construction of this first phase is well underway. For DUNE Phase II, this will be closely followed by an upgrade of the beam power to > 2 MW, for which the European groups again have a key role and which will require the continued support of the European community for machine aspects of neutrino physics. Beyond the neutrino beam aspects, LBNF is also responsible for providing unique infrastructure to install and operate the DUNE neutrino detectors at FNAL and at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). The cryostats for the first two Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber detector modules at SURF, a contribution of CERN to LBNF, are central to the success of the ongoing execution of DUNE Phase I. Likewise, successful and timely procurem
This report presents the final results of a study, 'Evaluation of Networks of Collaboration in IST Research within the European Research Area' (ERAnets), conducted for the European Commission. The ERAnets project developed and applied tools and methods to evaluate the networks of collaboration in information society technologies (IST) within the European Research Area (ERA), focusing on calls 1 and 2 of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6).
Energy system optimization models are indispensable for planning the European energy transition. Yet their applicability is constrained by the fundamental trade-off between spatial detail and computational tractability. Modelers often tackle this by spatially aggregating electricity networks. Existing methods, however, neglect differences in voltage levels, reducing them to a single level and thereby overlooking the critical role of transformers in expansion planning. Therefore, we propose a novel voltage-aware network partitioning and aggregation methodology that preserves individual voltage levels and transformers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and compare it against a voltage-unaware grid aggregation by solving a network expansion problem for a European case study using PyPSA. Our findings show that the proposed methodology preserves up to 70% of the transformer expansion costs in the aggregated model compared to the full grid model, thereby significantly improving the accuracy of investment decisions for transformers in the aggregated grid.
The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) has been set up by the European Union to create a sustainable complex of services for researchers. EHRI will bring together information about dispersed collections, based on currently more than 20 partner organisations in 13 countries and many other archives. EHRI, which brings together historians, archivists and specialists in digital humanities, strives to develop innovative on-line tools for finding, researching and sharing knowledge about the Holocaust. While connecting information about Holocaust collections, it strives to create tools and approaches applicable to other digital archival projects. The paper describes its current progress and collaboration across the disciplines involved.
The search for dark matter is an exciting topic that is pursued in different communities over a wide range of masses and using a variety of experimental approaches. The result is a strongly correlated matrix of activities across Europe and beyond, both on the experimental and the theoretical side. We suggest to encourage and foster the collaboration of the involved institutions on technical, scientific and organisational level, in order to realise the synergies that are required to increase the impact of dark matter research and to cope with the increasing experiment sizes. The suggested network -- loosely titled "DMInfraNet" -- could be realised as a new initiative of the European strategy or be based on existing structures like iDMEu or DRD. The network can also serve as a nucleus for future joint funding proposals.
Axions and other very weakly interacting slim (with $m <$ 1 GeV) particles (WISPs) are a common feature of several extensions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The search of WISPs was already recommended in the last update of the European strategy on particle physics (ESPP). After that, the physics case for WISPs has gained additional momentum. Indeed, WISPs may provide a new paradigm to explain the nature of dark matter and puzzling astrophysical and particle physics observations. This document briefly summarizes current searches for WISPs and the perspectives in this research field for the next decade, ranging from their theoretical underpinning, over their indirect observational consequences in astrophysics, to their search in laboratory experiments. It is stressed that in Europe a rich, diverse, and low-cost experimental program is already underway with the potential for one or more game-changing discoveries. In this context, it is also reported the role of the EU funded COST Action ''Cosmic WISPers in the Dark Universe: Theory, astrophysics, and experiments'' (CA21106, https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA21106) in coordinating and supporting WISPs searches in Europe, sha