Participate

Access for Biologists

As a biologist with a robust and suitable assay, you are invited to collaboratively develop a chemical tool compound for your target of interest. Your assay will be screened with the whole European Chemical Biology Library (ECBL) in one of our 17 screening facilities across Europe and the data will be made available to the broader scientific community through our open access European Chemical Biology Database (ECBD).

In collaboration with our medicinal chemistry groups, identified active compounds (‘hits’) can be chemically optimised further and translated into valuable tool compounds.

    

    

Who can apply to access EU-OPENSCREEN screening services?

  • If you are a researcher from academia, a non-profit organisation or industry you can request access to our screening services.
  • Any scientist can apply for access. However, different compound replenishment fees apply, depending on whether the applicant is affiliated to an institute in an EU-OPENSCREEN member country (i.e. Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Norway, Poland and Spain) or not.

Project application: how to submit a proposal

You can submit your project idea to the EU-OPENSCREEN project management team via the dedicated Contact Form. We will evaluate the suitability of your request to our services and contact you to complete a full application form by connecting to the ARIA online submission platform. Guidelines on how to complete the online application form are available here.

Applications for access can be submitted at any time and will be evaluated on a rolling basis.

For further information and support in the application process please contact us at scientific-projects@eu-openscreen.eu.

Proposal evaluation

Your submitted proposal will undergo a two-step evaluation procedure:

  • A scientific review, wheretwo independent experts in the field of chemical biology will evaluate the scientific excellence of your proposal including its impact and innovation potential, the principal investigator and research staff, and its project feasibility and gender aspects. An exception will be made for those proposals that were already subjected to a peer-review evaluation prior to submission (for instance as part of a funding application). In such a case, applicants will be asked to report the available funding and related grant agreement number.
  • A technical evaluation, where the technical feasibility of your project will be assessed by one of our screening partner sites. Herein, the degree of pharmacological validation of your assay in a microplate format, the suitability for transfer to a miniaturised automated screening format, and the availability of key assay reagents will be taken into consideration.

Please notice that the application will remain strictly confidential throughout the review process as reviewers are bound by a non-disclosure agreement.

If your proposal is not complete and/ or it does not pass the minimum threshold/ criteria for acceptance, you will be asked to amend your proposal accordingly to the reviewer’s comments and re-submit your project.

Discussion between applicant and partner sites

If your proposal is positively evaluated, the EU-OPENSCREEN project management team will circulate it to the partner sites selected and/ or matching the service/ technology requested for the proposed research. At this stage, each contacted partner site will consider the project feasibility (i.e. robustness of the assay, maturity of the assay, other pre-requisites, if applicable) and prepare a cost estimation for the proposed research. The EU-OPENSCREEN team will then put you in contact with the partner sites of interest for further discussions on the project implementation (i.e.IP rights, costs, timelines etc).

Costs

A compound replenishment fee will apply for the usage of the European Chemical Biology Library (ECBL). The replenishment fee is established as follows:

  • 15.000€ for academic users coming from an EU-OPENSCREEN member country (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Norway, Poland, and Spain). 
  • 40.000€ for academic users coming from a non-EU-OPENSCREEN member country (any other country).
  • 42.000€ for users from industry irrespective of the seat of their organisation.

The compound replenishment fee will apply for the usage of the full set of the high-throughput screening (HTS) library (~95,000 commercial small molecules), while approx. 5,000 small molecules of the pilot library, containing 2,464 bioactive compounds and 2,464 HTS-representative compounds, are provided free-of-charge.

 

Funding

EU-OPENSCREEN ERIC does not provide funding for the services offered by the partners sites. These costs (e.g. personnel, machine time, consumables, labware etc) are discussed with the relevant partner site and depend on the complexity and duration of the project. Please get in touch with us at scientific-projects@eu-openscreen.eu for grant writing support and/ or help with funding opportunities or have a look at presently available project funding offered via EU-projects here

Partner site selection

Once you have selected the preferred partner site, a written project agreement between you and the site has to be signed. The agreement regulates the usage of the ECBL, IP rights, acknowledgments etc. You will be also asked to prepare together with the partner site a project workplan indicating main project milestones and timeline

European Chemical Biology Database (ECBD)

Please notice that, following an embargo period of up to three years, all primary screening data will be made publicly available through the ECBD for its rapid and safe dissemination and exploitation. Read more about our open access policy here.

 

High-Throughput-Screening Quality Control 

To ensure that data produced at different sites are comparable and reproducible, a set of common operational standards for the EU-OPENSCREEN screening sites have been defined and can be downloaded here.