Vision and Mission

The multidisciplinary IM@IT has catalysed the creation of a multi-site collaboration of twenty-eight Medium Range Facilities – which are more specialised collections of equipment – (see document Annex – MRFs) and one hundred and thirty Small Research Facilities – of which many universities will have some, but not all – (see document Annex – SRFs). Without IM@IT, these would not have been realised.

Through synergistic research activities among MRFs, SRFs, and Large Scale Facilities – highly specialised infrastructures operated nationally or internationally (see at link LSFs), 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 LSFs, which are not always fully geared to support national priorities (see document Annex – MRFs Proposals – Direct Access I and II Round 2023).

A key point is the recognition of a natural hierarchy of need/productivity in which users become familiar with different techniques at SFRs/MRFs, 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 MRFs and LSFs 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 LSFs 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 ISIS, the ILL (Institute Laue Langevin), and ESS (Lund).
In this context a particularly unique feature of IM@IT is that it provides users with a research pipeline from SRFs to MRFs and then to LSFs, and greatly enhances the deployment of user’s multi-disciplinary research ideas, which will then have better access to the European LSFs and in turn enrich their impact.

Mission

MRFs (and SRFs) are usually located at universities or research centres, used by few small groups, and not necessarily operating for user TA programs. Most of the SRFs and MRFs 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 SRFs to MRFs and to LSFs.

The creation of IM@IT in 2020 represents a significant step change in that it carried out a coordination action which joined five distinct laboratories (located at three universities and two research centres) into the IM@IT nodes, which started to operate synergically to provide user TA in a coordinated way. IM@IT is a partner in doing research with our 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.