Megascience facilities in global research infrastructure

Abstract

The term “unique scientific facility of the “Megascience” class” (USFMC) has come into widespread use in legal acts of a programmatic nature, which necessitates the study of the term in a legal context and determination of the relationship between this concept and the widely accepted term “global research infrastructure” (GRI). On the basis of the analysis of legal acts, policy documents and doctrinal sources, two key features of USFMC can be identified: 1) their large scale (physical, financial, technological), and 2) their particular relevance to science facilitating some breakthrough in a particular field of expertise. The study of the GRI essence makes it possible to propose the following definition: global research infrastructures are massive, valuable, unique due to their technical specifications complexes constructed and operated in the order of international cooperation (collaboration) between States, international organizations and other actors without international legal personality (State agencies, scientific institutions, funding institutions) and designed for long-term scientific research aimed at obtaining new breakthrough knowledge, substantially supplementing or modifying perceptions of reality. The domestic term “unique scientific facility of “Megascience” class” has the greatest overlap with such global research infrastructures as geographically localized (single-sited) large research infrastructures. The authors conclude that in order to align the domestic legal terminology in the field of “Megascience” with the terminology accepted world-wide, amendments should be made to the draft Federal Law “On Scientific, Scientific-Technical and Innovative Activities.”