Sustainability

From BioImagingUKWiki

Revision as of 11:41, 19 April 2010

Topics

Defining strategies and funding models for maintaining imaging infrastructure and facilities in the UK

Members

Martin Spitaler, Paul French, Lucy Collinson, ...

Activities

Our first meeting was a break-out session of the Imaging Facility Manager Meeting 2010 in Imperial College London (7-8 Jan 2010). We tried to identify systemic problems with the current funding system (predictable shortfalls, reviewing systems) and come up with ideas how the system could be improved. We also found that an inventory of existing equipment, know-how and support staff would be helpful for coordination and planning.

A summary of our discussions is available on the Meeting Website.

Resources

• Facility Managers' meeting

Current situation

• A mix of small, medium and large scale facilities

• Funding mainly via project grants or specific calls from funding bodies

• Strong move towards fEC, with many associated problems

• Some equipment mothballed due to lack of trained staff

• Many items of equipment outside facilities are heavily underused, poorly maintained and/ or inaccessible to other researchers

• Redundancy between facilities

Suggestions/ discussion points

• Maintain a mix of sizes of facility

• Address adjacency issues – smaller facilities remain close to researchers, whereas large specialised facilities will require staff and general lab space (hotel concept?)

• Direct funding for open access facilities covering equipment, support staff and contribution to service contracts. Either ‘free at point of use’ via peer review of projects, or at limited cost to the end user

• Fund facilities to supervise the running of underused ‘non-facility’ equipment as an efficient way of maximizing the impact of equipment funding

• New system of metrics for medium and large scale facilities including rigorous external review process, quality assurance, technical assessment and assessment of teaching and training. To take into account performance of suppliers (quality, service etc) and metrics on ‘user-created downtime’. Money goes to best-performing facilities

• Request funding bodies to coordinate equipment calls to make best use of capital

• Dedicated funding for specialised equipment and pre-commercial novel technology is needed, to promote development

• How can companies be involved? Would a mixed Open Licence / Commercial Licence model for technology be valuable, as is already established for software? Could companies save money by sharing development costs with funding bodies, which in exchange get the final product cheaper?

• Bulk service contracts between research councils and companies would make service contracts cheaper for facilities and avoid wasting money on equipment soon to lay idle. The number of service contracts would most likely be higher and more predictable, making it attractive for companies.

Pitfalls

• The balance of "small - medium - national facilities" needs to be discussed, to avoid large central facilities taking money away from established small local facilities

• Intellectual property rights in open access nodes

Preliminary draft recommendations

• Create one or more models for future facility distribution (reference international models eg Denmark, Norway, Australia)

• Encourage community to participate in the inventory of current facilities across the UK, currently maintained by the imaging facility at the University of York (Light, EM, Biomedical; equipment and know-how)

• Draw up a wishlist for equipment, as a reference for future planning

• Assess which current facilities are in a position to become general access or specialised nodes

• Continue discussions with research councils and funding bodies

• Coordinate with other imaging communities (physics, materials, chemists etc)