The UK JISC has just issued a very interesting report commissioned by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) department; it looks at an apparently novel potential strategy for evolving a federated and coordinated UK-wide digital research infrastructure; somewhat similar to what we have seen in the US with the evolution of research cyberinfrastructure. There are interesting differences between this report and what's happening in the US; for example, there's much more emphasis on scaling up research data management in a systematic way, and less consideration of sharing of instrumentation. In the US there also seems to be more consideration of collaborations spanning government, academia and the private sector in some areas of cyberinfrastructure evolution such as the pilot for the US National AI Research Resource (NAIRR).

Link to the JISC report

https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/9516/1/federated-digital-research-infrastructure-full-report.pdf

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI