Following Article 2(a) of the ERIC regulation, a European Research Infrastructure Consortium means
“facilities, resources and related services that are used by the scientific community to conduct top-level research in their respective fields. A Research Infrastructure covers major scientific equipment or sets of instruments; knowledge-based resources such as collections, archives or structures for scientific information; enabling Information and Communications Technology-based infrastructures such as Grid, computing, software and communication, or any other entity of a unique nature essential to achieve excellence in research.”