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Hi Everyone.

My institution would like to get a sense as to how many universities have explored or established incentivization programs that encourage faculty to place instrumentation within a core instead of the PI's lab. Would you be willing to let me know if your institution does this and what the incentivization process looks like (in general)?

For example, if a PI places an instrument in the core, do they receive funds from the institution to use the instrument as well as preferential/priority access to it?

Thank you in advance!

Joe

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Joe Dragavon
 
Director
BioFrontiers Advanced Light Microscopy Core 
JSCBB C315
University of Colorado Boulder
 

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Hi Joe, 

Our institution doesn't have such a program, but we do have instruments that PIs have opted to place in our core instead of in their lab. It is usually a team of PIs rather than one PI. We incentivize by giving subsidized pricing (kit-only cost, if I remember correctly), and priority queuing (we run their samples before anyone else in the queue, even if received later than existing orders in the queue). We also do give self-run access to those labs, though we are rarely taken up on it because we only charge kit-only cost to those users anyways so there isn't much of a reason for them to do the work of running it themselves. That being said, we always include this as an option so it might be appealing to include when proposing this. 

Hope this helps! 

Ashley Hurst

BPF Genomics Core Facility  

Harvard Medical School 

We have done this frequently with new recruits. Rather than putting an instrument in their lab, we encourage them to put it in a core. To incentivize this we give the recruit a college funded account that they can use to pay for use of the device. In some cases, priority access is also arranged. The core also takes on the cost of the service contract which saves the recruit from having to cover that expense each year. From the institutional perspective this is the best outcome as we enable the rest of our investigators to access new technologies and we offset some of our costs through the fees paid by all the other users of the device.

We don't have a formal program, but like Brian, we have been successful in using startup negotiations to place instruments in a core, and giving new faculty an account to use to pay for instrument use. This is a model we are trying to encourage across all the colleges here. For PIs writing equipment grants, we will often offer priority access to the instrument, usually both to them and the major user group.

Hi Joe,

Our Materials Testing Core here at CSU was largely formed from faculty donating equipment from their own labs into a shared use Core. The incentive for the faculty was mostly for those donating malfunctioning or poorly maintained equipment, and the Core was able to fix and upgrade, and receiving good training, often absent in the individual faculty's lab. I can put you in touch with their Director. 

My own Core was pulled out of a department back in 2020 and placed under central administration. Part of this move provided vouchers for 3 years to faculty in our former department to be used on services in our Core. I believe it was around $50k/year for the department. 

Finally, our institution also evaluates equipment requests in startups and will sometimes require the instrument to be placed in a Core as part of the startup package financing agreement. But there are no vouchers given to the faculty to use it in the Core. 

I hope this helps. 

Karolien

Great question and discussion! I don't know that our institution advertises it to PIs, but I know that they only offer matching/additional funds for equipment grant purchases if the PI is going to put it in a core. For example, if they needed more money above the $250K for an NIGMS equipment supplement. We have discussed this with several PIs, but it hasn't happened for our core yet. I do think there needs to be a discussion about hourly costs b/c we can't charge one PI nothing and charge everyone else our usual hourly rate. We have discussed giving that PI priority scheduling though.