Yuzhou Bai and Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R have just published a tremendous research report on what they call "research cores" -- the terminology here isn't well standardized, and I've often seem the term "core instrumentation facilities" instead -- which are shared scientific instrumentation facilities and related services that are commonplace at major research intensive institutions. Their work does a great service in illuminating many aspects of this essential research infrastructure component, and connects very directly to the work that CNI has done in our roundtables about the evolution of the research enterprise and research resilience (see https://www.cni.org/go/future-research-enterprise-june-2021 )

The Ithaka report, titled "What is a Research Core? A Primer on a Critical Component of the Research Enterprise", is at

https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/what-is-a-research-core/

This is well worth your time; it's a great contribution to our understanding of the research infrastructure. I invite you to consider some of the broader issues here around research data management and research resilience in the context of this work, and to also have it in mind as you see the closing in-person CNI December 2021 plenary session (or watch the video which we'll make available after the meeting) on the Carnegie Mellon CloudLab initiative.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNi