How do FAPESP and other Brazilian research funders support further development of research infrastructures?

The Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is public, so the taxpayers fund it. In Brazil some states created their own research foundations and some states did not. Sao Paulo, in this context, is an interesting case, which I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. It exists since 1962 and according to the constitution 1% of all fiscal revenues of the state belongs to the foundations. This means it’s always one percent – around 600 million US-Dollars per year. The foundation funds research through receiving proposals using a peer-review system to select them. We are very much a bottom-up organisation: most of the time we offer funding to individual researchers, not to institutions, universities or research institutes. We offer researchers to fund medium to large sized equipment that will be part of the infrastructure and award it together with the grants.

This way, every year between 5 to 10 percent of our expenditures are invested in upgrading the research infrastructure of the state. For example, a large part of this is done through a program that we call multi-user equipment. This is how it works: a researcher gets funding to buy large equipment and he or she must commit to making these open to other researchers in some parts of Brazil or in the world. In this case, they can charge costs, because they need to cover the costs of operating the infrastructure, but the equipment has to be available to anyone for a reasonable cost. By now, there is a large network within the state of Sao Paulo of user equipment including magnetic resonance probes, spectroscopes, microscopes, gene-sequencers and others. Researchers in Brazil or the rest of the world are free to use those; this way we are fostering a more efficient use of that infrastructure. Sometimes we also participate in worldwide initiatives to build large-scale infrastructures. For example, right now we are part of two large projects. In one we are building a large telescope in Chile, which is going to be the largest telescope in the world – the Great Magellan Telescope – and FAPESP is contributing four percent to that. We are also working with Fermilab, which is a large neutrino research facility that was just build in North America. And then, we are working with the national government of Brazil to build this new Synchrotron Light source. These are examples of large infrastructures that get our funding.

What are the main challenges in setting up research infrastructures? And how do you adapt them to actual researchers demands?

In our region the main challenge are institutional support to make the use the available equipment transparent to interested researchers. Research infrastructures are more than just the fact of having technicalities like gene-sequencers and so on. For example, in some some other countries universities have support-teams that help researchers in using the infrastructures. Here is Brazil this type of support for infrastructure work is mostly missing. Most of the time researchers learn how to use certain equipment themselves, so they end up being the researchers that write articles, teach and supervise the students, supervise the post-docs and people who write reports and do the accounting. This is one of the major challenges here: We have ways to fund the researcher, but the universities don’t have enough resources to support them, in order to save their time from managerial tasks, so that they can focus on science. Another example: We are now trying to make it mandatory for researchers to have a data management plan. One of the challenges we have is, that their universities don’t have a service that offer data management, so one of them has to organise a computer which doesn’t make any sense, it’s a waste of time, because in 5 years this computer will not be on the Web anymore, it has to be a institutional service – an institutional repository.