ATMO_ACCESS WP9 MS40 Description of application, review and selection process for TNA to ATMO-ACCESS facilities

This document is prepared in the context of the ATMO-ACCESS project (Solutions for Sustainable Access to Atmospheric Research Facilities), which represents the organized contribution of distributed atmospheric research facilities for developing a pilot for a new model of Integrating Activities. The project will deliver a series of recommendations for establishing a comprehensive and sustainable framework for access to distributed atmospheric Research Infrastructures (RI), ensuring integrated access to and optimised use of the services they provide. Recommendations will build also on the experience, feedback and areas of improvements coming from Transnational Access (TNA) realized in the project to test the harmonized access procedures and cross-RI access modalities and services developed.
ATMO-ACCESS will support the trans-national, physical and remote access to 43 operational European atmospheric research facilities, including training, as well as some joint activities to facilitate and integrate the access procedures, to improve the services the infrastructures provide and offer innovative cross-RI services.
The TNAs planned in the project will follow the access process described here. The document includes the list of the facilities that are involved in TNA provision since the project start and gives details on the promotion of calls and access opportunities, user application process, user evaluation and selection, support to access, and post-access requirements. In the initial phase, TNAs will be coordinated mainly through offline exchanges between the actors involved in the process and with tools adapted from those developed in previous/ongoing integrated activities. During the project, the TNA management system will be optimized with the use of an online, centralized access management platform.
The document is structured in 8 different sections. After this introduction, Section 2 provides a general description of the TNA activities planned in the project. Section 3 presents the modalities of access under the project, with the main rules to be respected and how these are implemented in ATMO-ACCESS. Section 4 details all steps in the ATMO-ACCESS TNA management process. Section 5 focuses on the activities to ensure the carbon footprint assessment of the TNA realized in the project. Section 6 describes the coordinated user helpdesk function. Section 7 lists all the access-related templates and forms that are (and will be) produced to support and ease TNA management.
The terminology used in this document is in line with the EU Charter for Access to Research Infrastructure. The references consulted are given in section 8.