User Costs

Fee-for-service work

The staff of the EMC can do a limited amount of "fee-for-service" work, meaning that the staff does all of the work involved in preparing samples for microscopy, the actual imaging and/or any further analysis. Fees for this work are based on an hourly fee for time the staff spends plus all the standard fees for the use of any equipment.  Staff time is charged regardless of whether staff are included as authors on resulting publications.

Such projects will need to be discussed in detail with the staff before work begins. The procedure for starting any new project with the EMC is described elsewhere.

Fee-for-service work is normally performed during what was referred to above as "prime time hours" (effectively 9 am to 5 pm, Monday thru Friday) and is billed at those standard rates regardless of when the actual work is done. Standard billing will also automatically include the new rates for long blocks of time described above. PI's may request that instruments be used during non-prime hours and will be billed appropriately, but in such situations, staff time will be billed at 1.5x the prime hourly rate.

Fee-for-service use of the EMC is best for the sort of work that will not be repeated frequently enough to justify training someone completely new to the equipment. However, the EMC staff strongly urges repeat users of the facility to invest in the training necessary to operate on a fee-for-use basis. Since we would like to encourage people to do as much of the actual work as possible, training new users in equipment operation will always involve only the cost of the instrument used (i.e., training does not add the additional cost of staff time). Training for the various pieces of equipment is described in more detail here.

When the staff performs fee-for-service work, we expect to be in very close contact with the people who have requested the work. When this fee-for-service work is initiated by students, post-docs or other research personnel, we also expect to be in contact with their faculty advisers. At a minimum, the EMC staff will provide a report either whenever there is something new to report or bi-weekly (whichever comes first). Users can also negotiate additional details of such communication during initial discussions of a project. This might include reports for each imaging session, weekly instead of bi-weekly progress reports, reports after agreed-upon benchmarks have been reached or any combination of these things. We strongly want to avoid situations where the amount of work and the total costs of fee-for-service work are unexpected, and feel that the best way to avoid this is through communication.

Note: The EMC will provide up to eight hours of fee-for-service work on new projects at no cost other than equipment fees. This is to encourage people to start new projects and to enable them to assess feasibility and likely costs of the project.

All the equipment in the EMC can be used on a "fee-for-use" basis, meaning that once people are trained to use specific pieces of equipment, there is a fee for the use of that equipment based either on the amount of instrument time reserved or (for some equipment) per use. Our fee-for-use plan is the most cost-effective way to use EMC resources.

Most instrument use in the evenings (usually 6 pm until 8 am the following morning) and on weekends (usually 6 pm Friday until 8 am Monday) is discounted by 12.5%. There are also now higher discounts when users reserve any of the microscopes for long blocks of time. These discounts start at "more than 4 hours" and are increased further after 8 hours and again after 12 hours.

The fee structure shown above is evaluated at the end of each fiscal year. Adjustments to these fees may be made at that time. We will solicit user input on proposed fee changes and also attempt to give users sufficient warning about fee increases that are the result of these evaluations.

We expect to see acknowledgement of the facility and its personnel in all papers and public presentations that make use of any sort of data obtained using the EMC. In situations where the staff generates images or any other data that are included in publications and/or presentations, these efforts should be acknowledged using staff member's names, their EMC affiliation and details of their effort. In addition, we expect that any sort of intellectual contribution to a project by members of the staff will be acknowledged with co-authorship. Finally, we ask that users of the facility discuss any work done by the staff before inclusion in any sort of publication or presentation.