Equipment Sharing
Equipment Sharing saves research funding by avoiding duplicative equipment purchases and leads to efficiency in overhead costs by reducing the space and energy/water requirements to support equipment resources.
5 Equipment Sharing Topics You May Want to Include in Your Grant Proposal:
1. Make use of resources already on campus to minimize funding requested in grant proposals and demonstrate compliance with federal requirements for equipment sharing and avoiding duplication
2. Grow a culture of equipment sharing on campus
3. Share beyond the most expensive equipment
4. Campus online tool to help enable equipment sharing and avoiding duplication
5. Promote a campus-wide culture of sharing equipment in interview questions and in offer letters promoting a culture of sharing
- Will you or do you make use of laboratory equipment or computer/software resources already available on campus instead of purchasing your own as part of this grant?
- Has your university taken action to easily communicate what core and shared instrument facilities exist on your campus and what equipment resources they contain?
2. Grow a culture of equipment sharing on campus
- Are you actively participating in equipment sharing between scientists? Is this accomplished through core facilities and/or informal sharing between scientists?
- Is your campus actively encouraging a culture for shared equipment, computer resources, and services, and providing support, such as tools (online centralized scheduling and billing), facilities, and funding for personnel in roles to manage shared resources?
- Is your campus connecting building projects with efforts to help scientist reorganize and establish shared equipment spaces?
3. Share beyond the most expensive equipment
- In most cases, sharing happens naturally for the most expensive equipment because it is too costly to purchase many of these resources. What are you doing to share other equipment resources outside of this cost prohibitive category, such as floor centrifuges, Ultra Low Temperature (-80C) freezers, PCR equipment, drying ovens, and many other pieces of laboratory equipment?
- Is your university providing support to help departments or institutes create managed, shared facilities with more common use equipment, rather than only sharing the cost-prohibitive pieces of equipment?
4. Campus online tool to help enable equipment sharing and avoiding duplication
- Have you registered your available equipment or services on a shared instrumentation network for your campus to access or do you plan to do so?
- Has your university taken action to provide an online resource to enable sharing, even for equipment found in individual labs? If so, is your campus connecting university funding for start-up packages, renovations, and other projects with requirements to register equipment assets on the online tool?
- Refer to the Shared Instrumentation Program at the University of California Santa Barbara as an example of such a resource: http://www.sharedinstrumentation.ucsb.edu/.
5. Promote a campus-wide culture of sharing equipment in interview questions and in offer letters promoting a culture of sharing
- When looking to hire new research faculty and staff, is your university including the topic of equipment sharing in interview question(s) and offer letter language?
