Tithe increased use of synchrotron beamlines by inexperienced users, and use of mail-in procedures, requires that users be able to enlist technical and scientific support for their projects. The GCPCC beamline staff must be able to get appropriate credit for their work. The object of this document is to help users and beamline staff reach easy agreement about the extent of the staff's involvement with the user's project, and the sort of credit that should be given. One can imagine two extremes: use of the beamline alone should be acknowledged with a statement of the beamline's name and it's funding agencies. A sample acknowledgement paragraph has been prepared and may be used for this purpose. On the other hand, extensive involvement in a project by GCPCC staff, with substantial effort on and off the beamline, obviously should be accompanied by joint authorship. There are many gray areas in between, and this document is intended to address those.
The traditional approach has users coming to the synchrotron to perform the data collection themselves. This often involves standard training and maintenance, and some minimal scientific contribution provided by the beamline staff. Typically this deserves the standard acknowledgement mentioned above.
Occasionally the beamline staff becomes substantially involved with the user's experiment. For instance, there may be a need to modify apparatus or software to allow an experiment to be performed, or there may be need to put substantial effort into working out experimental protocols, or helping to reduce and interpret the data. Both parties should consider very carefully whether this warrants co-authorship. In cases where the experiment really might not have been successful without this help, the beamline scientist probably should be a co-author.
With increasing frequency, users are mailing their prepared specimens to our staff for screening, experimental design, data collection and reduction, and preliminary analysis. These users should consider that their obligation for conferring co-authorship is substantially greater than traditional beamline users. In this case, the users depend on the expertise of the beamline scientists, firstly to perform the data collection, secondly to detect failures in the process, and thirdly to extract the very best out of the user's precious specimens. The skill level required of the beamline staff is high and the responsibility is great. The beamline scientist will need to make decisions about the experimental plan. After data have been reduced and scaled, to provide quality assessment, the beamline staff may analyze these data with a structure-solving and electron-density-map generating program. This step involves iron-clad measure of whether the data were collected properly. Therefore, each of these mail-in experiments should be considered an opportunity for the user to invite the experimenter to join as a co-author on that project.
