Leading edge e-infrastructures, including high-speed networks, grid platforms, supercomputing, repositories of scientific data, play a strategic role in changing the way science and engineering will be carried out in 2020 transforming the information-based society into a knowledge-based society.

The synergies of European initiatives are thought to complement national and regional initiatives and to reinforce the role of Europe as a global partner in research.

In the particular case of scientific data e infrastructure, the objective is to develop an ecosystem of European digital repositories, federating and adding value to national and discipline-based repositories and respond, this way, to the request from EU member states to improve the access to scientific information.

The emergence of "big data science" has a global dimension as it reflects the increasing value of raw observational and experimental data in virtually all fields of science (humanities, biodiversity, high-energy physics, astronomy, etc.). Europe has to pay particular attention to the aspects of accessibility to key data collections, its quality assurance and preservation. For example, European environmental policies are supported by the INSPIRE directive which intends to trigger the creation of a European spatial information infrastructure that delivers integrated spatial information services.

In an heterogeneous landscape of digital data in which it is estimated that only 28% of the research output is managed in digital repositories a new strategy for the management of scientific information and associated policies need to be developed, based on the path-finding activities of key research stakeholders as well as of academic institutions and libraries.