June 23, 2004

The PASS System Arrives

We are very happy to announce the arrival of the new Proposal, Allocation, Safety and Scheduling (PASS) system, which debuted in May for the submission of general user proposals for the fall cycle.

PASS was developed to facilitate submission and review of general user and proprietary proposals and the allocation and scheduling of beam time at the NSLS. To meet DOE reporting requirements and to ensure safety compliance, the safety approval form is also incorporated into the system.

The first phase (proposal submission, safety approval and the scheduling of general user proposals) is complete and online. Proposals (and Px Forms when appropriate) are submitted online in one system and routed for beamline review for feasibility and safety purposes. PASS then routes the form to proposal review panel (PRP) members for peer review and ratings, to allocation panel members for beam time allocations, to NSLS safety staff for review and approval, and finally for beam time scheduling. Each principal investigator and reviewer is granted individual access according to permissions assigned.

Instructions and frequently asked questions are provided throughout the system to ensure user friendliness and accessibility. At the bottom of virtually every page in the system is a link to send comments or report functionality issues or problems.

Further development will take place over the next few months to integrate proprietary proposals, safety approval for Participating Research Team (PRT) experiments, to further develop scheduling for all experiments, and to add more functionality and capabilities. The final phase will incorporate a reduced lead-time to provide for rapid access.

Some proposal process changes introduced in the PASS system are:

• PASS randomly assigns each proposal to three PRP reviewers who have reviewed the lowest number of proposals for the given cycle to date. This ensures that all reviewers review approximately the same number of proposals and that members are not overburdened with requests, and plans are in place to increase the pool of reviewers. PASS does not assign proposals to a PRP member whose institution is the same as the PI.
• PASS notifies PRP members by email after submission of the proposal by the PI, allowing reviews to take place as soon as the PRP member is able.
• Lifetime days are no longer requested. The PI requests the number of days needed in a given cycle, and this is the information that is vital for review, allocation and scheduling.
• Penalties for canceling beam time after allocation have been eliminated. Our goal is to re-assign canceled beam time to other users who were not allocated due to high demand.
• PIs must assign a lead experimenter to serve as lead person for the experimental team while present on the NSLS experimental floor, who will in turn receive an email with links to his/her roles and responsibilities.

ARTICLE BY: Mary Anne Corwin