1. Give us your feedback

After your experiment, you are invited to fill in a User Feedback Questionnaire to help us improve our services. 
If you’d like to, please don’t hesitate to visit us at the ALBA User Office as we would love to hear about your experiences at ALBA!

2. Submit your experimental report

Standard proposals shall submit their experimental report no later than three months after the experiment and, if possible, no later than the next call for proposal submission deadline.

BAG proposals shall submit yearly reports, if possible, no later than the next call for proposal submission deadline.

Those reports shall be submitted via the ALBA User Office Portal and will be reviewed to help with the evaluation process of future experiments at ALBA.

3. Publish your results and let us know

We kindly remind you that applying for beamtime commits you to inform the ALBA User Office of any publication that may result from measurements made while at ALBA.

Authors shall quote ALBA in the acknowledgement section as follow: “These experiments were performed at […] beamline at ALBA Synchrotron with the collaboration of ALBA staff.”

Please report your publication to us as soon as possible.

Guidelines for authorship and acknowledgement

Appropriate acknowledgment should be given to the support given by beamline and technical staff. Since this is a matter of judgment, the following guidelines are offered:

  1. ALBA staff named on as co-investigators on proposals for beam time at ALBA should be included amongst the list of authors.
  2. The inclusion of the local contact in the list of authors has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. The decision to include a local contact in the list of authors signifies that the person provided more than routine technical support. If the success of the experiment rested upon creativity, ingenuity or persistence of the local contact, possibly late into the evening/night, then inclusion on the list of authors would be fair recognition. Another indicator would be if the local contact provided substantial help with data analysis and interpretation.
  3. If the contribution of a member of ALBA staff does not justify inclusion in the list of authors, then a note indicating the support received from ALBA should appear in the acknowledgements section of the publication resulting from an experiment at ALBA.

4. Remote access to experiment data using SFTP

ALBA provides remote access to the experiment data using the SFTP protocol.

SFTP configuration parameters

All beamline users can download their experiments data connecting to:

  • Host: userdata.cells.es
  • Port: 443
  • Username: <proposal account> (i.e: u2013100654)
  • Password: <proposal password> (must be changed upon first arriving at ALBA to do the experiment).
    Password must be changed on the User office Portal, at the Menu on the left: My visits/Account Management.
  • Directory: /DATA (points to /beamlines/blNN/projects/cycleNNNN/publicname/DATA)

You can connect using any software that understands the SFTP protocol, here are some configuration examples for the most typical programs:

5. Access to Data Portal

A web portal is available for users where to access and annotate their data while they are doing an experiment and once they have finished, by connecting remotely.

Features

  • elogbook: to visualize and annotate data while acquiring them
  • DOI generator: to provide a persistent and unique reference for the whole experiment and optionally for groups of chosen datasets.
  • For some techniques (e.g. MX), extended Laboratory Management Information system (LIMS) capabilities to follow the different data acquisition and processing steps.

Now available for LOREA beamline, the rest of beamlines are being progressively added.