Assessment of the proposals and beamtime allocation

The review committees

Beamlines of similar techniques or activities have been grouped together to form 12 review committees whose members are specialists in related areas of science and are appointed by the ESRF management. This means that it is the beamline(s) requested by the main proposer, in the application for beamtime, which determine(s) the Committee(s) which will review the proposal.

The Review Committees meet twice a year, in April and in October, to assess proposals received at the submission deadlines of 1^st March and 10^th September, respectively.

If beamlines from different committees are selected

In the case where a proposal requests beamline which fall into more than one committee, each relevant committee will review the proposal, giving only a recommendation for the beamline(s) for which it is responsible.

The table below shows the 12 review committees, identified from C01 to C12, and the beamlines for which each committee will review and assess proposals:
 

Proposal Review Process

It is the beamline(s) requested by the main proposer, in the application for beamtime, which determine(s) the Committee(s) which will review the proposal.

The proposal review process allows all proposals received for a particular beamline to be assessed by the same Review Committee. This gives the Committees flexibility to optimise the selection of proposals to be performed on each beamline.

It is therefore extremely important that the proposer takes great care when filling in this part of the proposal form in order to have the proposal assessed by the appropriate review committee.

If beamlines from different committees are selected

In the case where a proposal requests beamlines which fall into more than one Committee, each relevant Committee will review the proposal, giving only a recommendation for the beamline(s) for which it is responsible.

Assessment of the proposals

Each application for beamtime, which is assigned a final number based on one of 12 scientific areas, is reviewed by one or more Review Committees.

The Review Committees, assisted by external referees where appropriate, assess the proposals for their scientific merit or their technical, technological and/or innovative relevance. They consider the proposals: they first assign each proposal a grade between 0 and 5.5 on the basis of scientific merit, 5.5 being the top score. At their meetings, the committees discuss the projects, and arrive at a final grade for each proposal; they also rank the proposals in order of priority for each beamline.

Beamtime is allocated on the basis of scientific merit, following the recommendations of the Review Committees, and provided the experiment proposed meets technical feasibility and safety requirements.