ERF’s Review of Working Practices of Analytical facilities During the Pandemic COVID-19 has strongly impacted analytical facilities’ operations. To support them in transition phase, ERF and CERIC analysed the operations and current safety measures of 28 Research Infrastructures, and developed a report with best practices that can be adopted when re-opening operations. Fundamental Research © Banner: Salma Baghdadi (CERIC-ERIC), SARS-CoV-2 illustration: CDC/ Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAMS The on-going COVID-19 pandemic has strongly impacted the operations of research infrastructures. To protect their staff, several analytical facilities are closed for operations or strongly limiting their activities while maximizing protection measures, while some others provide limited access to external researchers (users), primarily for COVID-19 related research. Yet, the crisis is likely to last months and all facilities are considering restarting their services, albeit remotely and/or with limited scale. To support these RIs in the transition phase, a questionnaire has been prepared by the ERF and CERIC to collect the current practices regarding operations and safety measures put in place by the facilities. The report summarises the responses, and discusses some of the issues and possible future decisions faced by the analytical facilities in the time of the pandemic. ► Download the report here: https://bit.ly/2YFTgxg The paper is available also on the Zenodo platform: https://bit.ly/2WcdsFz The questionnaire and report have been set up and developed by the ERF and CERIC in the frame of its Horizon2020 project ACCELERATE, funded by the European Union Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020, Grant Agreement 731112.
