Tokyo

At the moment, it's free — but academic researchers may soon have to pay to use one of the world's most powerful synchrotrons.

Under a plan being considered by the Japanese science ministry, academics would have to join their industrial colleagues in paying to use SPring-8 in Hyogo.

The proposal has already led SPring-8 researchers to begin a worldwide appeal to combat the user fee, which they will say will undermine research priorities at the facility.

SPring-8 has 48 beamlines of intense, stable light that are used by physicists, chemists and biologists to study the structure of molecules and crystalline materials. Like most such facilities, it charges some industrial scientists for beam use. But last month the science ministry ordered the facility to conduct a feasibility study on charging all of its users.

“SPring-8 was expensive to build and has high maintenance costs,” says Yasunori Kojima, director of the ministry's office of synchrotron radiation research. “These are tough times, and we have to think about how to make scientists bear some of the burden.”

It is not clear how much the user fee would be. But Akito Kakizaki, a physicist at the University of Tokyo's Institute for Solid State Physics, is heading a group of 13 researchers who say that any amount would change research priorities for the worse. The group, which is a subcommittee of the Japan Society of Nuclear and Radiochemical Sciences, has written to international synchrotron facilities for support.

The user fees would have to come from grants, which in turn would be beefed up to account for the extra costs. But according to Murray Gibson, director of the Advanced Photon Source in Argonne, Illinois, this system leaves funding in the hands of people too distant from the synchrotron facility to make good decisions.

Gibson has written to Kakizaki saying that he is “seriously concerned” about the “counter-productive” user-fee proposal.

Michael Chesters, who heads the Daresbury Synchrotron Radiation Source in Warrington, UK, also supports Kakizaki. His facility charged scientists for beam time until two years ago, when the pay scheme was cancelled. The charges made some worthwhile projects look disproportionately costly, says Chesters, leading to inappropriate decisions about who could use the beam. “Once the country has decided it is important to build the facility, it shouldn't punish those who want to use it most extensively,” he says.

Kakizaki's group will send its report to SPring-8 officials by the end of this month. A second group, headed by Hiromichi Kamitsubo, a former director of SPring-8, is also working on a report that will evaluate the proposal and the changes in funding needed to make the system work. The science ministry will make its decision about user fees by the end of this year.

→ http://www.spring8.or.jp/e