The RISIS project aims at creating a distributed research infrastructure to support and advance science and innovation studies. This will give the field a strong scientific push forward, and at the same time, provide a radically improved evidence base for research and innovation policies, for research evaluation, and for the quality of policy relevant indicators.The field of science and innovation studies is interdisciplinary, and is related to political sciences, sociology, management and economics. It has a strong quantitative core - with specialties such as scientometrics, technometrics and more widely indicators design - but for many important questions data were lacking or small scale only. This has made the field too much dependent on a few pre-existing datasets. However, during the last decade important efforts have been undertaken to develop new datasets on burning issues such as industrial R&D globalisation, patenting activities of firms, university performance, Europeanisation through joint programming, or the dynamics of nano S&T. Another new characteristic of the field is the development– together with computer scientists – of software platforms for collecting, integrating and analysing ever more data.Data and platforms are currently owned and/or located at many different organizations, such as individual research groups, companies, and public organizations – with very restricted access to others. Through deploying various networking and access strategies, and through joint research, RISIS will decisively open, harmonize, integrate, improve, and extend their availability, quality and use.