In a period of scarcity of resources but also when dealing with actions whose main actors are the performing organizations (as an example when sharing access to infrastructures, promoting staff exchange, allowing technology transfer), alliances can increase the impact of actions, reduce costs avoiding unnecessary duplications and create critical mass.

In general, a research alliance is a programmatic agreement, that is, a stable process to share and integrate activities to achieve common goals which are, case by case, addressed through specific actions. The activities can require funding but they are usually dedicated to support researchers or managers with their travel costs, meetings and research equipment. Any larger investment is mainly requested at external funding agencies, using the alliance itself as an added value to build a competitive consortium which can participate in open calls for proposals. Many alliances are present in the European landscape and mostly developed at bilateral level.

The European Energy Research Alliance has been identified as one of the well organized and functioning multilateral European Research Alliances (see Annex 1 Proposal for procedures for design and management of joint actions).  Their Joint Programmes can be addressed as templates for multi-lateral operative actions tailored to tackle the JPI Oceans objectives. Structuring the interaction between JPI Oceans and the Research Alliance could be adopted as described in figure 1.

The ultimate goal of Research Alliances is to build a stable, strategic and programmatic process within research performing organizations (RPOs). The involvement of their high level decision makers may allow a continuous "structured" link with the JPI Oceans Management Board and can result in a fast response for the adoption of specific actions. This process implies that the activities are not limited to the collaboration between researchers for specific deliverables but to an alignment of RPO programmes and a multi-national knowledge-based support to policy.