HT National Facilities: Upcoming Call for Access 2025 – Round 2

On 27 and 28 March, the SIEC (Standing Independent Evaluation Committee), visited HT to discuss the results of the first call for access, which was considered a pilot phase, and refine the upcoming call, planned to be published at the beginning of June 2025. 

SIEC, in Italian CIVP (Commissione Indipendente di Valutazione Permanente), is in charge of defining the rules for access to the National Facilities (NFs) and for the evaluation and approval of the access requests, with the aim of ensuring the scientific excellence of the projects receiving support by the National Facilities.

The committee was highly satisfied by both the remarkable scientific value of the applications received during this pilot call, and the high level of engagement from the scientific community.

As a result of fruitful discussions, the upcoming call for access will include minor optimizations mainly aimed at consolidating the mission of the National Facilities that, as stated in the Convenzione, is to support the quality of research and projects performed across Italy. This drives the approval of the access requests that has its foundations on two primary aspects: 1. scientific excellence; 2. widest support to the scientific community.

Following suggestions from the user community, a recommended limit in the number of applications submitted per institution has been removed. Instead, a cap will be applied after scientific review to ensure that no more than a defined percentage of all approved projects are affiliated with the same institution. The committee also decided that the number of applications sent for scientific evaluation should not exceed by a factor of three the estimated capacity of the relevant NF or service within. Considering the above and the steep increase in the number of submitted requests observed during the second application round of the pilot call, it was decided to introduce the option of applying a triage of the applications before the scientific evaluation phase. Such triage will be based on two primary criteria: justification for requesting access to the NF and previous and/ or ongoing access to the NFs. Secondary criteria will include limiting the number of applications received per institution, and if/as needed, as a tool of last resort, applying a lottery. Applications that pass the triage phase will be sent for scientific evaluation. This phase will be driven by scientific merit, with secondary criteria that take into account number of approved projects per host institutions and geographical distribution. As a general guideline, applicants are strongly encouraged to adopt standards of fair play and reasonableness, and to maintain a strong sense of community, by not overloading the system with applications that are multiple, repeat and/or scientifically not mature.  

Improvements will be implemented in the upcoming call, allowing also to transition from a strictly uniform approach across all NFs applied in the pilot call, to introduce facility-specific modifications, to enhance efficiency and provide a certain degree of flexibility to NF staff to optimize instrument utilization.

HT represents a unique resource for the Italian scientific community. SIEC recommends to treasure from these resources and as a community predict how the technologies will develop and adapt, with the goal of strategically investing the budget allocated to the NFs.

The coming months will be dedicated to the consolidation of the current calls for access, while the discussions on multidisciplinary and thematic calls will occur in 2026. 

Data management remains crucial, ensuring maximum community benefit from high-throughput data across all domains. SIEC recommendation is to develop a centralised data storage and management strategy that would allow to maximize the impact of the data generated through NF access.

Finally, to maintain independence, SIEC asks that requests from the community are not submitted directly to SIEC, but are instead channelled to HT for consideration.