PIANOFORTE Call for project partners to improve and harmonise access to European Radiation Protection Infrastructures

At the PIANOFORTE Infrastructures Workshop in January 2024, colleagues from PIANOFORTE Infrastructures WP and from the European Union (EU) Radiation Protection Research (RPR) Infrastructures Community discussed access to infrastructures in support of training and research. It was agreed that, while some of the large infrastructures have excellent policies and procedures in place, there is a clear need for further development and harmonisation of routes to access.

PIANOFORTE WP5, Infrastructures is now seeking proposals from the community to do one or more of the following:
-          Improve policies and procedures in relation to access to infrastructures for researchers within the EU RPR communities and beyond;
-          Improve communication of the available infrastructures and the routes to access, considering the FAIR principles;
-          Harmonise routes to access for groups of infrastructures.

Best practice in this area includes: Clear, easily accessible (e.g. on the website) descriptions of the available infrastructures and examples of how they have been used in the past; Information about how to express an interest or book time using the infrastructure, including the related costs; Information about Dosimetry, Calibration, biological facilities, Health and Safety and other related aspects, and local assistance for the visiting researchers in organising these; Information about travel and accommodation and local assistance for the visiting researchers in organising these. It is intended that this activity will widen awareness of the available infrastructures and the need for FAIR and open science.

This call is for projects of up to 1 year focused on one or a small group of Infrastructures. The start date should be before the 31st March 2025.

Funding is only available for existing partners of the PIANOFORTE project, and proposals from one up to a small number of partners are welcome.  The non-funded involvement of colleagues from SNETP / the OFFERR project (OFFERR - European User Facility Network - SNETP), as well as other partners outside the current PIANOFORTE consortium, is strongly encouraged. Separate budgets for each partner that will have costs are required. The budgets cannot be overlapping with each other if a common proposal is put forward.

The total budget available for this call is 25k Euros (total funding), and the total cost of each project should be no more than 10k Euros (in total, with PIANOFORTE contribution at 60%, according to the standard rules of PIANOFORTE funding). If the total cost of proposals deemed to be eligible according to the below criteria exceeds the allocated budget, then those funded will be the ones with the highest marks overall.

More information about the call can be found here.