The vision of e-Infrastructures is to boost collaboration among research communities and empower them, through ubiquitous, trusted and easy-to-access services for data, computation, and communication. Applications leveraging e-Infrastructures in domains such as e-Science, e-Health, or e-Education, have informed of great opportunities and novel ways to produce and share new knowledge, establish cross-disciplinary connections and diffuse research outcomes into the society.

However, despite their considerable technological advancement and proliferation, e-Infrastructures have not yet reached their envisioned impact, as they have not yet managed to fully bridge the Digital Divide. Such defect is mainly due to a variety of external impeding factors pertaining to infrastructural, social, economic, educational, regulatory and other causes. To reach the ultimate goal of Global Research Communities, it is therefore important that both readiness and penetration of e-Infrastructures be continuously monitored by governmental bodies and other related initiatives, under the prism of all aforementioned dimensions. In doing so, appropriate methods, impact assessment criteria and tangible metrics are called for, whereas new governance models, regulations and policies need to be established to support such activities in a sustainable manner.

Recognising the above mentioned challenges, the 6th BELIEF Brainstorming Workshop titled "Global Research Communities: success criteria for future impact" fostered discussions revolving around the above mentioned challenges. In this context, special focus was be paid on the required governance models, and ways of engagement of new user communities.

The workshop, held in Brussels on the 24th & 25th of February 2010, was organised back to back with the eResearch2020 workshop.  The meeting consisted of a mixture of presentations and discussions addressing several aspects around the theme of Global Research Communities and brought together participants from several disciplines and with different background/roles. The output of the workshop will be a report intending to contribute to the drafting of the EU research agenda on the related issues.