March 18th, a new European Research Infrastructure (ERI) celebrated its operation with a kick-off meeting at the coordinating Karlsruhe Nano Micro Facility (KNMF) of the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany.

The ERI is called EUMINAfab and is dedicated towards opening up so-called "transnational access" to the multimaterial micro- and nano-fabrication and characterisation capabilities of the 8 different infrastructures made available by its 10 partners. Via this integrating activity the European Commission is supporting the establishment of a unique technology platform that is open to external users from industry and academia alike. Access is granted to users based on scientific merit and will be free of cost if the results are made public afterwards. Furthermore, EUMINAfab supports the transnational access by reimbursing the travel expenses of its users.

Within the next few months the EUMINAfab consortium will develop its business processes and will launch the first call for proposals, hopefully in September 2009. The consortium comprises 36 infrastructures from partners like Cardiff University (United Kindom), CEA-Liten (France), FIAT Research Centre (Italy), IMS-Nanofabrication (Austria), Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Germany), National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom), Philips Research Miplaza (The Netherlands) and TEKNIKER (Spain).

You are invited to either meet EUMINAfab at the forthcoming conferences in Prague at EuroNanoForum or the joint conference of 4M and ICOMM in Karlsruhe, or to get in touch via the website.