With the internationalisation of resources, the COVID-19 crisis and the improvement of technologies to deliver services remotely, there is an emerging need to develop and/or improve the way that RIs provide remote access and training to their community.
On 14 April 2021, Euro-BioImaging ERIC and Instruct-ERIC hosted a one day virtual workshop for facility staff of Research Infrastructures to discuss the common challenges and potential solutions associated with the transitions from physical to remote or partial remote access and user training. This course received funding from EOSC-Life.
This workshop gathered more than 120 participants throughout the day from diverse Research Infrastructures on 4 continents. The exceptional popularity of this workshop, which was originally planned for only 50 participants, clearly indicates that a real need exists in the community for such events in which service providers and facility staff from different scientific domains can share experiences and discuss about the key tools, software solutions, and expertise that are important to transition from physical to remote access.
The discussion focussed on the many aspects and challenges that come from the provision of successful remote access and user training such as sample shipment, instrument control at a distance, remote user training, secure data management and data access by the users.
The programme of the workshop was designed to encourage interaction and discussion between participants and consisted of a combination of plenary sessions with short presentations, break-out sessions with specific topic focus and panel discussions. The content of the workshop, the recordings of plenary sessions, discussion summaries, and presentation slides were also made available to the participants after the event and can be made available within the EOSC-Life consortium upon request. Contact us if you wish to get access.
“The best part of the workshop for me was…. discussing and networking with people running very different facilities, having the same issues with remote access. It helps to exchange to come up with new ideas. I really enjoyed the workshop and hope that there will be more like this in the future. Thank you for organising it!”
Above 85% of the participants out of the 21 that answered our survey evaluated the workshop as very good or even excellent and about half of them reported that the event exceeded their expectations.
“The best part of the workshop for me was…the shared experiences from facility managers and realizing that everyone has the same problems. Also the willingness of the participants in sharing their own creative and ingenious solutions for solving the problems mentioned.”
Working with the 3i service team (3i remotely), Turku Bioscience Centre.
Photo credit: Henok Karvonen, Multimedia producer, Turku BioImaging, Finland
