RECOGNISING the longstanding organisation of the Joint Institute for Very Long Baseline Interferometry in Europe and the importance for the European Research Area it was agreed by the parties to transfer all operational activities from the Dutch national legal entity ‘Stichting JIVE’ into a legal entity under the Regulation (EC) No 723/2009 to be named ‘JIV-ERIC’.
Whereas:
The European VLBI Network (EVN) is a longstanding consortium with flexibly expandable structure that offers an astronomical observing facility through joint observations of radio telescopes across Europe and other continents and which is used by a vital and globally distributed scientific community. The EVN has been proven to maintain very high standards and a very stable network for more than two decades.
Within the EVN, the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) has been established in 1993 as a Dutch national legal entity (Stichting/Foundation) to implement central services and in particular the data processing (correlation) of the collected telescope data. It offers the users of the EVN support in proposing, processing and interpreting the observations of the EVN. It also provides feedback on the data quality delivered by the telescopes. JIVE provides the essential infrastructure for the joint observations of the EVN and other networks. JIVE has an active role in enhancing the capabilities of the EVN by developing new techniques, notably concerning the central processing and user services.
In this and other activities JIVE has acted as the representative of the EVN, in particular when carrying out EC programmes. The relationship of the JIVE infrastructure and EVN is addressed in the EVN Consortium Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) concluded in Berlin on 22 November 2002.
JIVE is currently legally framed in a Dutch Foundation. The ERIC is an appropriate legal entity to the science mission and ambitions of JIVE. The legal framework of a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) is incorporated under the provisions of Regulation (EC) No 723/2009.
The establishment of JIV-ERIC will provide more sustainability to the longstanding collaboration of nationally established research institutes in the field of Very Long Baseline Interferometry. The VLBI-networks are critical and key technology for leading and future research infrastructures in radio astronomy.
The JIVE correlator is the core of the JIV-ERIC infrastructure. It is an essential central component to form the VLBI Research Infrastructure. JIV-ERIC shall continue the existing collaboration and contractual obligations with all the EVN-partners and structure and align this with the JIV-ERIC mission. JIV-ERIC will correlate any EVN projects. Additionally, JIV-ERIC will promote and implement the use of VLBI and other radio-astronomy techniques.
IT WAS AGREED among the founding Members to establish and implement JIV-ERIC in compliance with the following provisions.