Research infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services that are used by the research communities to conduct research and foster innovation in their fields. Where relevant, they may be used beyond research, e.g. for education or public services. They include: major scientific equipment (or sets of instruments); knowledge-based resources such as collections, archives or scientific data; e-infrastructures, such as data and computing systems and communication networks; and any other infrastructure of a unique nature essential to achieve excellence in research and innovation. Such infrastructures may be 'single-sited', ‘virtual’ or 'distributed'.

Research infrastructures play an increasingly important role in the advancement of knowledge and technology. They are a key instrument in bringing together a wide diversity of stakeholders to look for solutions to many of the problems society is facing today. RIs offer unique research services to users from different countries, attract young people to science, and help to shape scientific communities.

The European research infrastructures (including e-Infrastructures) work programme 2018-2020 consists of six calls for proposals in which proposals are invited against specific topics:

• Development and long-term sustainability of new pan-European research infrastructures
• Implementing the European Open Science Cloud
• Integrating and opening research infrastructures of European interest
• European Data Infrastructure
• Demonstrating the role of Research Infrastructures in the translation of Open Science into Open Innovation
• Support to policy and international cooperation