In times of profound change and international tensions, it is often said that certain elds—such as sports, entertainment, and science—should simply “do their job”, avoiding commentary on what is happening in society. The publication of the ESO white paper Designing the Community Infrastructure for ESO’s Next Transformational Facility. Equitable Governance and Sustainable Teams for 2040s Astronomy shows how reductive this idea is.
Science does not exist in a vacuum: it is made up of people, institutions, international collaborations, and organizational choices that directly in uence the quality of the research produced. For this reason, as the major astronomical infrastructures of the coming decades are being designed, the scienti c community is beginning to ask not only which telescopes to build, but also how to organize the communities that will use them.
The white paper – a document that analyzes a problem and proposes ideas or recommendations to address it, often prepared by experts to guide future decisions—does exactly this: it calls for rethinking in advance the structures of collaboration, governance, and participation for future large astronomical facilities, with the goal of building a more equitable, sustainable, and effective scientific community.
This reflection does not arise by chance. As astrophysicist Annagrazia Puglisi, Lecturer at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton, UK, and first author of the white paper, explains, an important window has opened. ESO’s call within the Expanding Horizons framework invited the astrophysical community to re ect not only on the major scientific questions of the coming decades, but also on the conditions needed to address them. It is not enough to ask what science we want to do, she notes, but also with which people, with which structures, and under what conditions of access and sustainability.
When science becomes a global enterprise
We are far removed from the days when Galileo could point his telescope at the Moon from his backyard and forever change our view of the sky. Modern astrophysics is increasingly based on large-scale infrastructures: radio telescopes such as ALMA in the Atacama Desert, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and even more ambitious projects like the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), which will come online in the coming decades.
These instruments involve thousands of researchers worldwide and require decades of planning. And it is precisely this timescale that highlights a fundamental issue: scienti c infrastructures are often designed long before the communities that will use them.
A concrete example is JWST. Many of the students and early-career researchers analyzing its data today were not yet born—or had not yet begun university—when the project was conceived in the 1990s. In the meantime, the scientific, technological, and geopolitical context has changed profoundly. International mobility, for example, is now in uenced by global events such as con icts in Ukraine, Palestine, or Iran.
In other words, when major instruments nally become operational, scienti c collaborations often face organizational challenges that were not anticipated at the outset. Many of these issues emergeonly once the infrastructures are already in place and collaborations have begun, making them harder to address.
As Dr. Puglisi highlights, large international projects face at least four recurring challenges: difficulties in communication across globally distributed communities; lack of transparency in access mechanisms and leadership roles; job insecurity, particularly for early-career researchers; and the burden of so-called “invisible work”, such as mentoring, software development, or coordination—essential tasks that are often under-recognized. These activities are crucial for the functioning of research, yet they rarely receive the same recognition as publications. This is essential work, Dr. Puglisi notes, but it is often unevenly distributed and poorly visible, and not adequately recognized, even though it is a necessary condition for high-quality research.
Rethinking collaborations: not just instruments, but communities
Building a scientific community after the infrastructure is already in place is far more dif cult: without having taken part in the decision-making process during the construction phase, both one’s role and the science proposed are disadvantaged. For this reason, the white paper proposes a shift in perspective: designing the scienti c infrastructure and the social infrastructure of the community together.
The first concerns governance – how decisions are made within collaborations and who represents the scientific community. In very large projects, clear and transparent rules are essential to ensure trust and participation.
The second focuses on sustainable teams. Scientific work is not limited to observations and publications: it also includes technical activities, instrument and software development, mentoring, and coordination. Recognizing and valuing these contributions is essential to maintaining balanced and long-lasting collaborations.
The third area is training and inclusion, meaning ensuring that people from diverse backgrounds have access to scienti c opportunities and can contribute to research.
Finally, the document emphasizes the importance of more transparent and accessible structures for international collaboration, capable of adapting to an increasingly global scientific community.
A paradigmatic example of this approach is represented by Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) practices. Equity means creating conditions that provide real opportunities for everyone. Diversity refers to the presence of different cultural, social, and scienti c backgrounds. Inclusion, in turn, means building environments in which all individuals can fully contribute to the scientific life of the community. Numerous studies show that more diverse teams produce better scientific results.
However, without conscious design, certain dynamics risk repeating themselves: for example, the same individuals may consistently take on organizational or coordination roles, often without receiving adequate scienti c recognition. These situations can lead to unbalanced workloads and, in the long term, to burnout.
But the importance of these practices is not only organizational or strategic. Science is made by people, Dr. Puglisi notes. It makes no sense to talk about scienti c excellence without considering the conditions of those who make it possible. Environments in which people feel heard and respected foster new ideas and creativity, while contexts in which part of the community feels excluded or undervalued can result in a real loss of scienti c potential. As Puglisi adds, Some of my most fruitful scientific ideas have emerged in environments where I felt my voice was taken seriously.
A question for the entire scientific culture
Although specific to scientific research, these issues concern more than just researchers. Those involved in science communication or education can also recognize their importance.
The science we present in books, conferences, or museums is the result of a complex network of international collaborations, institutions, and research communities. If these structures function better, research becomes more robust, opportunities are more equitably distributed, and scientific results become more reliable. Moreover, understanding how science is produced—not just what it discovers – is an integral part of the scientific narrative.
What community for the science of the future? Building tomorrow’s science today
The white paper looks primarily to the coming decades. New astronomical infrastructures will open unprecedented possibilities: the ELT will allow us to observe the Universe with unmatched sensitivity, while the SKAO will study the cosmos at radio wavelengths with extraordinary precision.
The question the astronomical community should ask is not only: which telescopes should we build? But also: what kind of scienti c community do we want to build to use them?
Because science is not made only of telescopes and data, but above all of people and the structures that allow them to work together.
The ESO white paper invites the astrophysical community to take a further step: to design large scientific collaborations with the same care devoted to designing instruments.
Building a more equitable and sustainable scienti c community is not only an ethical issue. It is also a profoundly scientific one: the best way to allow the best ideas to emerge and to ensure that the extraordinary infrastructures of the future can truly lead to new discoveries about the Universe. The envisioned change is not immediate, but concerns a long-term direction. It involves moving from a model in which individuals must adapt to the scale of projects to one in which collaborations are designed to enable everyone to contribute fully. This would mean greater transparency, better recognition of technical and organizational work, and more stable conditions for those currently building their future in precarious contexts. If we want to tackle increasingly ambitious scientific questions, Dr. Puglisi concludes, we must build infrastructures that genuinely broaden the possibility of remaining in academia, contributing, and building collective work. Because even
those who manage to move forward alone do not go very far on their own.
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