Abstract
The ESFRI Roadmap marked a turning point in the evolution of European thinking on research facilities, providing a catalogue of such facilities with their characteristics. In parallel, the ESF (European Science Foundation) completed a questionnaire-based survey of research facilities. Finally, the ERF (European Research Facilities) consortium representing national facilities with international access was formed to parallel EIROForum (the European laboratories funded by international subscriptions). It is becoming increasingly clear that management of these facilities and management of the research process require extensive ICT: for research managers that is provided by CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) and to give researchers additionally access to facilities to control experiments with associated modelling and simulation and access to research datasets and software.