Vision and Mission

Vision

The multidisciplinary IM@IT has catalysed the creation of a multi-site collaboration of more than fifty Medium Range Facilities (MRF) – which are more specialised collections of equipment and more then one hundred Small Research Facilities (SRF) – of which many universities will have some, but not all. Without IM@IT, these would not have been realised.

Through synergistic research activities among MRF, SRF, and Large Scale Facilities (LSF) – highly specialised infrastructures operated nationally or internationally, IM@IT operates a multi-level Transnational Access (TA) program for users from both academia and industry. The TA program enables the multidisciplinary community – from life sciences to engineering – to take full advantage of the very significant investments made by European Countries in LSF, which are not always fully geared to support national priorities.

A key point is the recognition of a natural hierarchy of need/productivity in which users become familiar with different techniques at SFR/MRF, before progressing to more complex RIs and becoming LSFs expert users. This hierarchy applies not only to a given research question, but also to training and education of novice users in accessing the more advanced and more expensive methods. Research carried out at the European RIs needs to be constantly nourished with new users and new research and innovative ideas. However, for users having little or no experience in the use of the analytical tools required to exploit MRF and LSF there is a steep learning curve to develop proficiency in their use. Many researchers, if they do not have prior experience, find that the highly competitive access to LSF is a high barrier. IM@IT is contributing to reduce this barrier, which benefits the research but also enables Italy to get better value from those LSF that it contributes to financially such as Diamond (UK), ELETTRA (I), ESFR (F), the ILL (Institute Laue Langevin – F), ISIS (UK).

In this context a particularly unique feature of IM@IT is that it provides users with a research pipeline from SRF to MRF and then to LSF, and greatly enhances the deployment of user’s multi-disciplinary research ideas, which will then have better access to the European LSF and in turn enrich their impact.

Mission

MRF (and SRF) are usually located at universities or research centres, used by few small groups, and not necessarily operating for user TA programs. Most of the SRF and MRF are based at universities and at research centres. In most cases instruments are financed by universities and research institutions through projects, and the operation costs are financed either by the same project or by other projects. These loans do not generally include provisions for external users access to unused machine time, which would require funding for external user support and training. Therefore, two significant opportunities are missed under the current system: 1) to exploit the initial capital investment to the fullest by maximising high-payoff machine usage and 2) to allow a wider section of the scientific community to make a qualitative leap, moving from SRF to MRF and to LSF.

The creation of IM@IT in 2020 represents a significant step change in that it carried out a coordination action which joined ten distinct laboratories (located at five universities and five research centres) into the IM@IT Units, which started to operate synergically to provide user TA in a coordinated way. IM@IT is a partner in doing research with users, not just a community doing research.

What is the IM@IT added value compared to what is already financed?

The IM@IT added value consists in selecting research centers with state-of-the-art instrumentation and providing targeted funds to make machine time available for external groups (industrial or other Italian university departments and research centers) that do not have such instrumentation at their own institutions. This would allow significant leveraging of public investment in small- and medium-scale instrumentation: a realistic goal is 80% usage, up from a typical 50% under the current model.