Annual reporting guide · National Science Foundation program

MIP annual reporting: what the report needs and where the time goes

Materials Innovation Platform

A MIP is a national user facility. Most of its reportable output belongs to researchers who do not work there, so collecting the information is harder than writing the report.

What reviewers look for

External user access and outcomes, alongside the platform's own in-house research and data sharing.

The sections that cost the most time

External user projects and outcomes: The users' work is what the platform delivers, and users have the least reason to reply. Their papers, acknowledgments and results must be collected from outside the institution.
Internal versus external usage: The ratio shows whether a platform serves the research community, and it comes from instrument logs built for scheduling instead of reporting.
Data sharing and reuse: Platforms are expected to publish data as well as papers. Datasets need identifiers, licenses and a record of where they came from, captured when they are produced.
Acknowledgment verification at scale: Hundreds of external users produce papers that may or may not cite the award. Checking each one by hand does not work at that volume.

What a MIP is

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the Materials Innovation Platforms as large, multi-year awards for materials synthesis, characterization and theory, operated as national user facilities. Researchers from anywhere can apply for access, run work on the platform's instruments with the platform's staff, and publish the results.

That is both the purpose of the program and the reason its reporting is hard: a platform's impact is mostly other people's science.

What the annual report asks for

All the usual center sections, plus a detailed account of the user program: who was granted access, what they worked on, what came out of it, and how the platform's capacity was split between external users and in-house research.

Data sharing carries real weight. A platform is expected to make data available and reusable, so datasets are reportable products with their own identifiers and records of where they came from.

Where the time goes

Most of the output belongs to outside users, who have no reason to reply.

An internal researcher who ignores a data request will see the coordinator at lunch. An external user finished their run fourteen months ago, went home, published eight months later, and has no particular reason to tell anyone. Yet that paper is the platform's main output, and whether it acknowledged the award decides whether it counts.

Across a full user program, the annual report becomes a campaign to collect information from people who have already moved on.

How SimplyScholar helps

We built mip.org, the website for the Materials Innovation Platforms program, for Penn State's 2D Crystal Consortium (2DCC). We have built National Science Foundation program websites since 2016.

In SimplyScholar, our software for research centers, publications are imported from CrossRef by Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and matched to researchers, so a user's paper can be added from its DOI without retyping it.

For the work the platform runs itself, people have roles with start and end dates, and projects and outreach are kept in the same record. The public website is built from those records.

Other annual reporting guides

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