User Program
EMSL is one of the 28 U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facilities. EMSL is housed on the campus of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program supports EMSL and several other user facilities who are conducting research related to the fundamental understanding and prediction of complex biological, Earth, and environmental systems for energy and infrastructure security.
As a user facility, EMSL provides shared laboratory resources, instrumentation, and expertise to the scientific community. Access to EMSL is determined by a competitive peer-review process. User facilities are open to all potential users without regard to nationality or institutional affiliation.
Active User Statistics
To uphold the value of user statistics, the Office of Science has established a set of shared core principles for defining and counting users. These principles, along with definitions for each user facility, can be found at The Office of Science national scientific user facilities web page. For purposes of reporting EMSL user data to DOE, EMSL tracks the number of active projects, active users by project, user institutions by project, as well as the number of distinct users and User institutions.
User Definition: An individual who makes use of EMSL resources. Each user will be categorized as one of the following:
1) Onsite User – An individual who is a member of an approved research team, has signed all required user agreements, and is physically present using an EMSL capability, at least once during the reporting period, to conduct research on an active, peer-reviewed project.
2) Remote User – An individual who is a member of an approved research team, has signed all required user agreements, and has been granted authority by the principal investigator to participate remotely in experimental/computational planning, execution (including remote operation of instrumentation/computing hardware or engaging with EMSL staff on sample submission/delivery), and data analysis on an active peer-reviewed project.
3) Data User – An individual who registers for an EMSL user account and downloads data from EMSL’s public data portal during the current reporting year, but did not participate in the collection, calibration, or reconstruction of those data.
User Counts:
1) An individual is counted as a user only once per fiscal year regardless of their number of active projects or data downloads. EMSL follows a hierarchical scheme for counting, in which an On-site User takes precedence over a Remote User. EMSL staff projects and resource owner user's are not included in user counts.
2) Data Users are counted once regardless of the number of data downloads and are counted separate from On-site and Remote Users.
PDF and Excel versions of the Fiscal Year 2023 User and Proposal Statistics are also available.
