The LNLS Users Committee is keeping regular meetings with the LNLS management to follow up the updates on the facility and suggest improvements. We are using this channel to communicate the news.
On March 16th, some of the members of the Committee (Alejandro Ayala, Daniela Zanchetti, Eduardo Granado, Hudson Carvalho, and Maria Fernanda Mera) met with Mateus Cardoso & Narcizo Marques de Souza Neto, heads of Soft and Biological Matter & Condensed Matter and Materials Science Divisions, respectively, as well as Brunno Lange Albuquerque, manager of the users support services (SAU). Find below a briefing of this meeting.
The main topic of this meeting was a discussion on the beamtime proposal evaluation system, which was preceded by a detailed exposition of the statistics related to run 1/2023. As broadly advertised, the proposals were reviewed by peers, i.e. by other researchers competing for beamtime at the same area of the proposal but not necessarily in the same beamline, and by a committee of ca. 9 experts from several fields of knowledge, named CACIP. Up to five reviews (and five scores) were obtained for each proposal. The main role played by CACIP consisted in arbitrating inconsistencies or discrepancies among the scores given to a given proposal by the referees. This process was double-blind, so the reviewers do not have access to the name of the proponents and CACIP does not know the names of the proponents. In addition, the LNLS management noted that the proposals of some areas tend to have different average grades than others, which was interpreted as characteristic of each area. As proposals from different areas were competing for the same beamtime, it was deemed necessary to normalize the grades of the proposals considering the average score of the proposals in the same area. Besides such normalization, no further modification in the proposals’ scoring and classification was made by the management.
It was reinforced that the review process is still under development and some improvements should be implemented in the next calls. Notably, a clear guideline of score attributions is under study, providing an objective description of what is meant by the proposal scores 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. More time will be given for both review levels to work on the revision. Additionally, if a given proposal is not accepted, the proposer may receive feedback on how the proposal could be improved. Intending to reduce the subjectivity of the analysis, the LNLS Users Committee suggested a multidimensional evaluation of the proposal, with separate grades being attributed for different aspects such as: i) scientific impact, ii) feasibility/previous sample characterization, iii) requirement/justification of SR, iv) experimental setup description, for example. Again, clear guidelines of score attributions should be defined for each item. The LNLS Users Committee also suggested that LNLS send a survey for the community to gather impressions of the current proposal evaluation process. Perhaps this could contribute to the construction of a bottom-up evaluation process. In this context, the community can expect the next proposal call by April 2023.
Preparations for the Annual Users’ Meeting are starting by collecting possible speakers’ names. For this year, our idea is to highlight the SR related work carried out by Latin-American researchers worldwide.
Finally, both the LNLS researchers & LNLS Users Committee are considering co-organizing a FAPESP São Paulo School of Advanced Science on 4th Generation SR Techniques in 2024.
Proposals acceptance outline:
EMA –rate of acceptance31%
- received proposals 83
- accepted proposals 26
CARNAUBA –rate of acceptance 38%
- received proposals 82
- accepted proposals 31
IPE –rate of acceptance 38%
- received proposals 45
- accepted proposals 17
CATERETE –rate of acceptance 39%
- received proposals 49
- accepted proposals 19
IMBUIA-MICRO–rate of acceptance 59%
- received proposals 29
- accepted proposals 17
IMBUIA NANO–rate of acceptance 41%
- received proposals 37
- accepted proposals 15
Hudson Carvalho