Physical and remote access to the European Volcano Research Infrastructures as a strategy to promote the community building: efforts, challenges, and results.

Indeed, nowadays data sharing via internet is one of the most used approaches to networking scientific communities. However, the opportunity to physically access Research Infrastructures (RIs) and their installations and facilities is potentially the most powerful mean to build up a community. Physically access, in fact, makes the ideal conditions for the RI’s providers and users to work side by side on specific research topics. This is recently the case of the European trans-national access activities promoted in order to allow and push the volcanology community to use either the volcano observatories, to carry out experiments or fieldworks, or laboratories, for exploiting analytical and computational facilities, belonging to the main European volcano research institutions.

The EUROVOLC project has granted the access to 11 RIs for an overall of 45 installations, including single facilities of pools of mobile instrumentation and of laboratories, and remote access to collections of volcanic rocks, of 5 European countries (France, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). In the frame of the project, the trans-national access offer has come from 7 partners (IMO, UI, INGV&CNR, CIVISA, IPGP, and CSIC) acting in 7 WPs (13, 14, 16, 16, 17, 18, and 19).

The EUROVOLC work-plan has foreseen two calls, one in 2018 and the other in 2019, allowing users to apply for access the RIs, and the effective physical access in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Each call has been managed according to a stepwise process based on an excellence-driven criterion, in which the roles of the various actors and the schedule have been previously defined.

This contribution aims at presenting the management and coordination efforts related to the trans-national access activities in the frame of EUROVOLC including the preparation and the launch of the 1^st call, the process of the selection of the proposals, the feedback from the management of the 1^st call, the preparation of the 2^nd call, and a critical analysis for improving the management of the 2^nd call.