On Wednesday 17 August the EPSRC announced that their equipment sharing database is now live. The database contains information about research equipment available in UK universities available for researchers to use. Universities can also register any equipment they have to share with others.
Following the Wakeham Efficiency Review, and the EPSRCs capital reduction, we are looking to promote equipment sharing. One way we wish to facilitate this is to allow researchers and institutions to voluntarily provide details of equipment they are willing to share on a database hosted by EPSRC. The Materials Database has been a useful tool to researchers for the past few years and following consultation it has now been expanded out to cover the entire EPSRC remit.
Anyone is free to search the database, but to input equipment we ask you to register your details first, which may be done following the link on the database website. You are free to include any equipment you wish to share, not just that which was funded by EPSRC, and likewise this database is free to search by any researcher, not just those currently or previously funded by EPSRC. We wish to encourage all our researchers to make use of this tool to either source equipment that would aid you in your research, or to provide access to your equipment to others in the research community.
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