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Community Proposals - HUBs and BAGs
The ESRF has implemented new access models that will facilitate access to the ESRF for researchers working in fields of important societal impact and willing to collaborate to produce more impactful science, but also facilitate access for user communities if they can structure themselves in such a way as to efficiently use regular beamtime slots for the projects they consider to be of highest importance for the community. These “community proposals” are intended to optimise the use of the new EBS X-ray beams that will allow faster and shorter experiments due to their unprecedented intensity and coherence by :
- reducing the lengthy set-up and take-down overhead time per project by fully utilising the useful beamtime in between to measure data on a maximum number of samples and projects,
- encouraging user communities to agree together on the most important projects and samples for that community, and to assign priorities for a particular beamtime slot,
- ensuring regular access to ESRF beamtime to allow these priorities to be set and to allow a strategy for best use of the beamtime to be conceived within the community,
- creating scientific synergy within the community to develop tools for data acquisition, analysis and interpretation.
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Community proposals group together scientists working on similar scientific topics or themes who apply together as a consortium for a regular allocation of beamtime at the ESRF to work on that topic or theme. If successful, the ESRF will grant the beamtime to the community who decide between themselves how best to distribute the beamtime within the community and for which projects in order to produce the most impactful science in that field. In addition to the existing structural biology (SB) BAG proposals, the ESRF has also implemented
- HUB proposals, and
- BAG proposals for non-structural biology topics.
The essential difference between a BAG and a HUB is that a BAG groups together a number of independent Principal Investigators (PIs) working on similar scientific or technical projects, who share beam time and decide on measurement priorities. Apart from collaborating to share beamtime, they will generally work independently and do not necessarily share results, although they may if they wish. The HUB access mode is different in that it groups a number of PIs working on the same major scientific theme of significant societal importance, but who commit to collaborate and work together to coordinate the beamtime use and share results obtained in such a way that progress is faster and more impactful across the field, rather than made incrementally by the different PIs working separately. This necessitates that the HUB members share knowledge, beamtime data and results prior to publication.
In late 2020, the ESRF SAC and Council approved the creation of pilot proposals to test these new access modes, and at the March 2021 proposal deadline 3 pilot proposals for new community access proposals were solicited and submitted. These proposals are :
- BAG Proposal – science driven
HG-172 (Gonzalez): “Structural analysis of historical materials”
Heritage scientists studying historical materials, on ID13 and ID22
- BAG proposal – technique driven
MI-1397 (Eakins): “Shock BAG”
For the study of materials under rapid and extreme loading, on ID19
- HUB proposal
MA-4929 (Lyonnard): “Multi-scale Multi-techniques investigations of Li-ion batteries: towards a European Battery Hub”
Grenoble Battery Hub, on 19 different beamlines.
More details can be obtained for each pilot proposal by clicking on the appropriate link. As well as testing the principle of such access modes, these pilot proposals were used to identify the appropriate workflows required to properly handle proposals for community access in the future.
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