Research Infrastructure (RI)

The following definition for RI from Article 2 (6) of the Regulation (EU) No 1291/2013 of 11 December 2013: `Establishing Horizon 2020 - the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014- 2020)` applies: “RI are facilities, resources and services that are used by the research communities to conduct research and foster innovation in their fields. They include: major scientific equipment (or sets of instruments), knowledge-based resources such as collections, archives and scientific data, einfrastructures, such as data and computing systems and communication networks and any other tools that are essential to achieve excellence in research and innovation.” Accordingly, RI are implemented along different organisational models, including central sources and laboratories for experiments and measurement sessions, coordination and management of geographically distributed observatories or laboratories, remotely accessible resources for computing, data banks, physical sample repositories, surveys and longitudinal studies.