The principles of the Core Facilities are based on a simple idea: to make expensive and unique instruments accessible to as many users as possible, both here and abroad. “Its facilities are on offer not only to internal users but also to those from outside and partially also for businesses,” explained CEITEC Director Markus Dettenhofer. For example the extremely expensive nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers that the Josef Dadok National NMR Centre brings to the CEITEC Core Facilities mean that scientists in each individual institution concerned with structural biology do not have to purchase such equipment but can carry out the required measurements in Brno. “This means that the limited funds available for scientific investment are freed up to be used only for truly essential infrastructure and not in duplicating expenditure on these devices,” added Markus Dettenhofer. Furthermore instrumental capacity used by only one research group or university is usually not fully utilised.
Aside from financial savings these Core Facilities, or central laboratories, bring further benefits. They save on time (both the installation of these devices and training of the expert assistants to run them take up a lot of time), and on the basis of close cooperation with the manufacturers it is possible to achieve the development and most up-to-date modernisation of the existing equipment, meaning that scientists are left to concentrate only on productive research, in turn improving its quality.
The joint regulations anchor the Core Facilities within CEITEC Masaryk University and Brno University of Technology. Their mode of operation differs from that of the classical research group which solves the issues of access to infrastructure including data analysis and access to instruments either independently, or after training.
The regulations also introduce the model of the purchasing commission, which previously did not exist in the centre and the partner institutions. “Their task will be to assess the appropriateness of all the equipping machinery for all six of the partner institutions in CEITEC. The Commission will review any purchases of instruments over 5 million CZK. The aim is to prevent purchases that duplicate existing equipment, and to promote investments that make sense from the perspective improving the level of science in CEITEC in terms of economic operability and usability,” said Kateřina Ornerová, manager of CEITEC Core Facilities.It will also be a signal to grant providers, such as the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, that CEITEC and its partner institutions are interested in the effective exploitation of funding and not in acquiring instruments that are already accessible for use, for example in other Czech research institutions.
CEITEC offers the services of its ten Core Facilities laboratories to external users both from the Czech Republic and abroad via the publicly funded “CEITEC - open access” project. Applications are carefully assessed in a quick, open and transparent process. More than 7 million crowns will be used for this project in 2015, and last year through CEITEC – open access some 70 external users’ projects were carried out, 16 from abroad and 54 from domestic institutions/users.
