a) Research infrastructure
Facilities, resources, and services that are used by RDI players to conduct research, development, and innovation activities. Research infrastructure includes major scientific equipment (or sets of instruments); knowledge-based resources such as collections, archives, and scientific data; e-infrastructure, such as data and computing systems and communication networks; and any other tools that are essential to achieve excellence in RDI.
b) Government-funded research infrastructure
Any research infrastructure in the Kingdom that is partially or entirely funded by government funds.
c) Host organizations
Any organization (for example, higher education institution, research organization, or innovation hub) that hosts government-funded research infrastructure in the Kingdom.
d) Internal users
Users that are part of the host organization (or its network in case the host organization is part of a network) that manages the research infrastructure.
e) External users
RDI ecosystem players that are not part of the host organization (or its network). These users—both Saudi and non-Saudi—can be individuals, teams, and institutions from academia, business, industry, public services, and non-governmental organizations. They are engaged in the conception or creation of new knowledge, products, processes, methods, and systems, and in the management of projects. Teams can include researchers, doctoral candidates, technical staff, and students participating in research in the framework of their studies. In short, all users who are not considered internal to the host organization (or its network) are external users.
f) Access
The legitimate and authorized physical, remote, or virtual admission to, interactions with, and use of government-funded research infrastructure, and to services offered by host organizations. Such access can be granted, amongst others, to machine time, computing resources, software, data, data-communication services, trust and authentication services, sample preparation, archives, collections, the set-up, execution and dismantling of experiments, education and training, expert support, and analytical services.
g) Open access
Allowing external users to access government-funded research infrastructure to conduct research, development, and innovation activities.
h) Access unit
A measure specifying the access offered to external users. Host organizations are responsible for the definition of access units, which may vary from precise values like hours or sessions of beamtime, to gigabytes transmitted for the conduction of complex experiments or quotations based on external users’ needs. Access units are helpful in planning the workload of the research infrastructure, measuring its utilization and effectiveness, and managing its maintenance.