European research infrastructures increasingly face a shared challenge: how to ensure that valuable scientific services, data, and communities continue to thrive once project funding ends. Recent collaborative steps within the PITHIA-NRF partnership illustrate how this challenge can be addressed through trust, cooperation, and the right enabling infrastructure.

PITHIA-NRF (Plasmasphere, Ionosphere and Thermosphere Integrated Research Environment and Access Services) is a European Research Infrastructure initiative dedicated to advancing scientific excellence in upper-atmosphere and space-weather research. During the project, which started as a four-year-initiative in 2021, PITHIA-NRF integrated 15 major national and regional research infrastructures across Europe, including globally recognised facilities such as EISCAT, LOFAR, ionosondes/digisondes, GNSS receiver networks, riometers, Doppler sounding systems, and VLF receivers.

Together, these facilities generate vast, heterogeneous datasets essential for understanding and predicting space-weather phenomena that affect satellite operations, navigation systems, and critical infrastructure on Earth. PITHIA-NRF’s ambition was not only to connect instruments but to build a coherent digital ecosystem where data, models, and services could be accessed and reused across disciplines.

Right from the start, EGI has played a central role in turning this ambition into reality. Through EGI services, including federated authentication and authorisation, cloud and data services, monitoring, and operational support, PITHIA deployed the PITHIA-NRF e-Science Centre and operated it at high maturity (TRL 8).

EGI enabled interoperability across national boundaries and technical domains, ensuring that PITHIA services aligned with FAIR principles, EOSC practices, and robust operational standards. Just as importantly, EGI provided something that many research infrastructures lack: a trusted, production-grade operational environment that researchers could rely on without investing heavily in long-term IT maintenance.

As the project approached its conclusion, one question became central: how can PITHIA-NRF continue to operate and evolve beyond project funding?

The answer took shape as a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding, now signed by 17 organisations. The MoU establishes the PITHIA-NRF Collaboration Committee, a governance framework that brings together research infrastructures, service providers, and coordinating partners to collectively shape the future of PITHIA.

The MoU focuses on:

The MoU provides a lightweight yet powerful coordination mechanism that reflects how modern research infrastructures function: through shared responsibility, trust, and best-effort contributions.

For EGI, participation in the PITHIA-NRF Collaboration Committee is more than continuity: it is strategic alignment in action. The continued operation and support of the PITHIA e-Science Centre position EGI as a long-term enabler of scientific infrastructure; it strengthens engagement with a specialised, high-impact community, showcases the sustainable use of EGI services for discipline-specific research, and opens the door to new collaborations, innovation, and funding opportunities.

At the same time, PITHIA-NRF benefits from EGI’s operational expertise, scalability, and compliance with European standards, allowing scientists to focus on research rather than infrastructure maintenance.

The PITHIA-EGI collaboration illustrates a broader lesson for the EGI community: sustainability is not achieved through technology alone, but through governance, partnership, and shared vision. The MoU is a starting point: a platform for evolving services, new scientific use cases, and future European initiatives.

As research infrastructures across domains face similar sustainability challenges, the PITHIA-NRF MoU offers a practical, replicable model: one in which EGI enables communities to transition confidently from funded projects to long-term, community-driven operations.