FAST – coordinating access to world-class imaging facilities in Europe and beyond

Open science extends beyond open access to journal publications and datasets, and into the realm of services, instrumentation, and facilities. Of particular interest to the European research infrastructure landscape is transnational access (TNA), where users obtain free-of-charge physical or remote access to infrastructure, facilities, or equipment. The European Commission has recognised the vital nature of TNA in stimulating research and collaboration within Europe, by funding projects through dedicated EC Horizon calls, and harmonising access policies and regulations.

EXCITE and EXCITE2 are examples of successful EC-funded TNA projects, which provide free-of-charge access to advanced electron microscopy, X-ray tomography, and complimentary imaging and data processing systems, enabling research into Earth and Environmental materials at 22 European partners institutes. To manage the combined total of 7500 days of access for 1500 projects to 40 installations, we have developed the Facility Access SysTem (FAST - https://fast.geo.uu.nl/) as our dedicated access management application.

FAST streamlines the call-for-proposals access process and includes call setup and advertisement, proposal submission, technical feasibility check, scientific review, and reporting. FAST has a database component in which facility and equipment information is stored alongside GDPR-compliant metadata about users, facility managers, reviewers, coordinators, and database managers. The FAST stack consists of an HTML/JS front-end (Tailwind), and a Slim, Laravel/Eloquent and Postgres back-end, while the webserver infrastructure is hosted at Utrecht University. The FAST database can be queried by REST/JSON API, which is used by EPOS ERIC and EPOS MSL to extract facility information that is subsequently displayed in their data portals. FAST integrates ROR-identifiers for facilities and institutions and ORCID for natural persons. This enables linking datasets (DOI) to the facilities and researchers who created them, thereby contributing to the FAIR open science landscape.

Based on user feedback and project requirements FAST is continuously developed further under EXCITE2. Our ambition is to make this robust and user-friendly access system available to the broader ESFRI Environmental community by aligning with ongoing efforts to consolidate the European transnational access research infrastructure landscape. We actively engage with, and are open to, other ERICs/ESFRI landmarks to strengthen collaborations and coordinate shared access policies, technical interoperability, and other synergies. As such, we aim to make FAST the central access system for the Earth and Environmental sciences in Europe.