How to write and submit a proposal?

General Information

The proposal language is English. Please note that there are slightly different proposal guidelines for the PETRA III and FLASH facilities. Table or figure design can be freely chosen, but please respect the restrictions of space and specification of the contents to facilitate the work of the referees.
The expected length of a regular PETRA III proposals is 2 A4 pages incl. figures, tables and literature references. Long-term projects (LTP) for PETRA III comprise 4 A4 pages. FLASH proposals require additional information but the total length must not exceed 6 pages. In any case, the maximum PDF file size for uploading is 4 MB.

Please note that the project review panels may reject proposals that do not comply with the guidelines with respect to length and content!

Submission of your Proposal

Before submission you have to register as DOOR user. Please make sure that all co-proposers have registered in DOOR, too. Otherwise it will not be possible to include them in the proposal. After registration you may submit your proposal following the instructions given in DOOR. As first step, please fill in the general part of the proposal submission form. This includes the submission of a short abstract (max. number of characters 500) of your proposal. Please upload your detailed proposal description as a pdf-document in DOOR. You may also save your proposal application at any time and continue at a later date. However, the online submission must be completed before the deadline for proposal submission at DESY Photon Science.
DOOR will automatically generate a cover page for your proposal including abstract, information on all proposers, title, beamline, experiment specifications etc.
If you have not completed the submission procedure, you can edit/complete/delete your entries. Once a proposal is submitted, it cannot be modified or deleted by yourself. In case you need to edit or change the proposal after final submission you have to contact the users office for support.

Responsibilities of project leader and principal investigator

The project leader takes the general responsibility for the project and participating personnel coming to DESY for the experiment, including safety and legal aspects. Therefore, the project leader is expected to be an experienced researcher like a "senior scientist" and should be employed at the institution proposing the experiment.
The project leader, principal investigator as well as the proposer will be informed upon proposal submission, acceptance or rejection.
After allocation of beamtime, only the principal investigator is eligible to take all necessary administrative steps within DOOR (e.g. safety declaration, registration of experimenters, application for travel cost reimbursement).