This survey is mainly targeted to directors or responsibles at an infrastructure. Ideally, it is completed together with a person from SESAM performing an interview. If the questions have been considered beforehand, it should not take more than about 20 minutes.
The main focus of the project is ”open” lab-based infrastructure, meaning infrastructures that are open for use by parties external to the organisation(s) that host them. The target is mainly lab-based infrastructure, where most of these are of relevance to materials-, engineering- and life sciences, as well as those included in the EU definition of ”technology infrastructures” [1]. The majority of these are infrastructures hosted by public authorities (such as universities), and some are hosted by institutes or companies that are partially or wholly state-owned.
For all, government regulations represent the main constraints under which the lab-based infrastructures operate. The project has been established to support these infrastructures and help solve or mitigate long-term issues that seem to plague all regardless of their hosting structure and organisation.
In brief: The goal of the project is to establish a guide described in a handbook for national best practices targeted to those who host such infrastructures. The handbook will help directors, administrators and legal counsels to manage and mitigate administrative and organisational barriers to making the infrastructure available to outside parties.
[1] The project scope does not cover repositories for biological material or data, or computational infrastructure. A separate project, Genomic Medicine Sweden, covers bio-related repositories and computational infrastructure is largely unaffected by the accessibility issues targeted in this project. For a definition of “technology infrastructures”, see https://ec.europa.eu/info/publications/technology-infrastructures_en
The survey consists of five parts A-E:
Part A - General information about the infrastructure
Part B - Robust and transparent processes for access. Meant to deal with questions such as:
- Which contracts or agreements are needed to cover external users, and what alternatives exist in the forms that these can take? - How can we make it easy for external users to understand and deal with these contracts or agreements, physically and digitally?- How can we secure the correctness of such contracts or agreements vis-a-vis government regulatory frameworks, and which specific areas/points need to be covered by agreements?- How can we prioritise between requests from different categories of users in a clear and transparent way, and balance these to the occupancy rate?
This includes principles for managing and prioritising between different bids for use – research projects, collaborative projects including the private and/or public sector, fully costed contract research, or other collaborative modes.
Part C - Appropriate pricing and competition. Dealing with questions such as:
- Can equipment partially financed by public money be used to deliver services in a competitive marketplace?- If so, what alternatives exist for appropriate pricing and offerings to external customers?- How can one ensure operation in clear harmony with competition regulations?
One goal is to develop a concrete practice for adopting pricing to different situations and actors, including how to assess when these need to define their compliance with regulations relating to competition and governmental financial support. This also includes pricing, e.g. including and excluding operator support, or when training of external users is a precondition for use.
Part D - Clear management of proprietary information and confidentiality. Addresses questions such as:
- How do we deal with IPR, NDAs, computer security and confidentiality (including GDPR)? What are the alternatives?- How do we produce practical and legally precise agreements covering these issues?
Part E - Safe access. Addresses questions such as:
- How do we deal with workplace health and safety, insurance, employment and work environment issues when external staff are active in an infrastructure?
This includes routines and best practice for dealing with risks connected to people who are using the infrastructure without being staff members, such as insurance and work environment questions.
Individual survey responses are kept confidential within the set of people working in the SESAM project and are to be considered working materials. All descriptions of challenges and solutions that are referred to in any reporting from the project are by default anonymised so that one cannot deduce which organisation or individuals they are sourced from. Any deviations from this requires express permission from respondents.