Data-intensive research poses both new opportunities and challenges, calling for a new way of dealing with data. For the European Union, preparing for this scientific digital challenge is fundamental for competitiveness. The Research Data Infrastructure envisioned by GRDI2020  is an entire digital environment enabling a variety of interactions among data management systems, digital data libraries, research libraries, data collections, data tools and communities of research alongside the organisational practices of the people and institutions using it. Emphasis is placed on handling knowledge freely and dynamically to enable research communities to strike a balance between competition and co-operation. The GRDI2020 Roadmap lays the foundation stones for the future.

The GRDI2020 press release explores data and knowledge for global challenges like the unsustainable food supply, technological perspectives underpinning data-intensive science like cloud computing, as well as policy and organisational, including strategic approaches to scientific data management.