Use of the facilities is intended for short-term projects

 

The requirements of academic researchers and many commercial users are very different; CMSE's services are designed for the former.  In particular, CMSE does not consider itself ever to be "under contract" to provide any service to an outside customer.  This makes it inappropriate for a commercial user to depend upon use of the CMSE facilities, as would be the case, for example, if an extensive research program were designed around measurements to be made in a facility, or if a major product refinement, involving many iterations, includes a characterization step to be performed on facility instrumentation.  As a matter of policy, therefore, CMSE will not approve "long-term" projects for commercial users.  A corollary of this is that we do not accept "renewal" applications for use of the facility.   Each project is considered to last for no more than a year.  A commercial applicant filing an essentially similar application after an initial one has expired will be expected to justify in strong terms why they should be allowed to continue using the CMSE facilities.

The definition of what is "short term" is left intentionally vague.  For example, a user making one appointment every two months will be allowed a more generous interpretation than a user making two appointments every week.

 

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MIT-CMSE September 2007