This report aims to offer a contribution to the support of coherent approach to offer scientific community important information on the possibilities to establish links with current EU and WBC research infrastructures and also to inform important national and EC policy makers on the important barriers and needs that still needs to be tackled in relation to the development of future Pan-European Research Infrastructures.

Based on an online questionnaire which was the basis for the assessment and examination of access conditions to research infrastructures in the EU MS and in the WBC, this report provides an investigation into the possibilities and conditions for European and WBC researchers to access large (and important medium) scale European and WBC research infrastructures.

Our investigation showed that some WBC and EU RI institutions have already established some ties with one another but a lot of the European institutions that participated in the survey expressed that problems of not so intensive collaboration with WBC  arise due to the lack of sufficient funding,  the lack of strength in the specific scientific community,  the fragmentation of WBC research community, the countries' different level of development of the research infrastructures, legal issues, and an information problem resulting from the fact that all EU RIs are not aware that all WBC countries recently became associated countries to the FP7 and that they are on the equal footing for the participation in European research programmes.

These findings call for proper actions that need to be taken in order to rise the awareness among the EU RIs and at the same time also to rise awareness at WBC research institutions.  They give an excellent opportunity to encourage governments in WBC to find the right balance between restrictive economic policies, clearly necessary for macroeconomic stabilization purposes, and other types of policies with long-term effects which can contribute to raising national systems of research.

Facilitation and networking of existing research infrastructures and building up new research facilities at the interregional level can help strengthen the mobility of WBC and EU researchers even further as scientists will have the possibilities of joint usage of infrastructures.

Updated versions will be published when available.