Review and Approval

Project Review Panels

Depending on the facility requested and the scientific topic, project proposals are reviewed by one of fourteen international Research Project Review Panels (PRPs).

The following aspects are considered during the review:

  • prime criterion is the scientific excellence of the proposal
  • necessity of the requested beamtime for the described objective
  • expected output (such as the probability of publications). The reviewers are asked to strive for a balanced selection of both scientifically exciting (but maybe challenging or risky) experiments and standard proposals leading to (an expected) rapid publications of results
  • publication history of earlier proposals of the same group
  • submitted/missing experimental reports
  • internal review

Proposals that do not meet the proposal guidelines with respect to length and content may be excluded from the review process by the PRPs and will then be rejected.

The final approval of proposals is issued by the DESY Photon Science Management in agreement with the PRPs and under consideration of available beamtime. We notify the applicants about the results of the research proposal evaluation and whether beamtime has been allocated by e-mail. For PETRA III proposals this will usually be in January for proposals submitted for the call with deadline in September. For proposals submitted by March, applicants will be informed in June. Please note that due to overbooking of the facilities even highly ranked proposals may not receive beamtime.

For FLASH proposals the additional step of beamtime application via DOOR is necessary after approval of the project.

For each proposal we select a local contact at the facilty who should be contacted soon after the notification.

The Photon Science Management reserves the right to accept promising and outstanding test experiments on short notice.
In addition, the management also reserves the right to reject proposals that are not in accordance with the users' obligation to pursue exclusively research for peaceful purposes during any experiments carried out at DESY.