Terms of Reference

HOAHub Scope

• Studies in HOAHub should focus on Human Organs.
  • There is no restriction on types of human organs.
  • Animal organs may be included for validation, comparison, or other scientific or biomedical reasons, but must comprise a minority of the scan time.
• Studies in HOAHub should ideally be hierarchical in nature (e.g. large whole organ scans with localised zooms) to take advantage of HiP-CT technology.
• Studies should aim at adding greatest benefits to HOAHub (e.g. adding data to Human Organ Atlas, making the whole of consortium greater than sum of the parts).
• Primary samples need to be greater than ca. 3cm in all dimensions. (Biopsy or small portions for zooms can be included for hierarchical studies, but must comprise a minority of the scan time. (Note, smaller samples may be scanned at other beamlines, e.g. SLS TOMCAT, DLS I13, APS 2-BM, or responsive mode proposals to ESRF BM05).
• Studies involving significant developments such as dynamic imaging such as flow, mechanics and electrical should be done via responsive or LTP modes, and only considered for the HOAHub once more established.
• Please get in touch via hoahubesrf@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Overall Governance

The governance model of the HOAHub is set out below. The model aims to provide an effective and agile decision making core, (Executive Committee, EC), with scientific and technical input from the group of members (Members’ Committee, MC). The objective performance of the HOAHub is ensured by an independent Steering Committee (SC). European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) will act as Observers and provide factual information but will not participate in governance through voting. The HOAHub is supported by a beamline scientist and portions of an organ technician, optics technician, algorithms developer and data engineer at ESRF. These staff are key to the success of the hub, and are currently funded by a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative-University College London-ESRF-University Hospital Aachen (CZI-UCL-ESRF-Aachen) grant. All members are committed to trying to find funding to sustain these roles, as appropriate, for continued HOAHub operation. The HOAHub Director will act as a co-ordinator of the scientific activities that are decided upon through the Members’ and Executive Committees. A lead CZI-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at ESRF will work with the Beamline Scientist, both helping the Director to coordinate science. A Project Manager will support the Co-Chairs and Director.

Please refer to our Terms of Reference for detailed definitions of different roles in the HOAHub.

Members

• The Member Committee will contribute to the core scientific vision and goals of the HOAHub through complementary expertise with the other Members.
• The Member Committee will contribute resource (person/funds/other), play a role in governance, and seek funding for the HOAHub and aligned research projects.
• The Member Committee will share all results, methods, and resource with other members immediately and put data and software in the Human Organ Atlas and open access repositories upon first publication (or within 3 years, whichever is shorter).
• The Member Committee will help organize and run training.
• The Member Committee will follow the standard ESRF User and Policies and Rules (safety, sample declaration, GDPR, travel rules, data policy, …).
• The initial Members are the Co-Investigators from the HOAHub proposal. After the first year new members can apply at any time. A decision on new membership will be provided within c.a. 6 months, through a vote of the MC. New members should provide complementary expertise, applications, etc that fit the goals of the Hub (see ESRF definition of a Hub).
• The Members’ Committee will meet on a semi-annual basis. The Members shall each be permitted to delegate their vote to a nominate representative.

Collaborators

• HOAHub beamtime awardees who are not a Member or Collaborator, will automatically become Collaborators. When awarded a HOAHub beamtime, the Collaborators will share data and relevant experimental methods immediately with the Members.
• The Collaborators must agree to the HOAHub data/publication rules and put data in the Human Organ Atlas and software in open access repositories upon first publication (or within 3 years, whichever is shorter).
• The Collaborators will follow the standard ESRF User and Policies and Rules (safety, sample declaration, GDPR, travel rules, data policy, …).
• The Collaborators will join regular and ad hoc Working Group meetings.

The difference in benefits and commitments between Members and Collaborators:

Use of HOAHub and HiP-CT data and publication rules

We are making HiP-CT and associated data from Human Organ Atlas Hub (HOAHub) beamtime MD-1389 (and associated beamtimes, e.g. MD-1290) available for the purposes of collaborative research. If appropriate, a collaboration agreement will be entered into to cover the full terms under which the data are made available. By agreeing to this, you are agreeing to standard academic confidentiality terms, including not publishing the data without checking with use, and following the rules & data policies of ESRF (see www.esrf.fr/datapolicy) as well as our funding conditions from CZI (see chanzuckerberg.com/rfa/deep-tissue-imaging/), specifically:

• Arising Intellectual property should be made freely available for all academic and non-commercial use.
• Any datasets either curated or generated using the HiP-CT data shall be made publicly available and easily accessible online under an Open Definition-Conformant License.
• Any publications and research findings arising from using this data should made public availability without conditions or restrictions on academic and publication freedom. All publications of research findings need to be made open access.
• In acknowledgement, please include “This project has been made possible in part by grant number 2020-225394 and 2022-316777 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, CZIF2021-006424 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility beamtime MD-1389 (or MD-1290, as appropriate), led by PD Lee, P Tafforeau, CL Walsh, et al.”
• Please also cite the Nature Method Paper (DOI: 10.1038/s41592-021-01317-x)  in any publication using HiP-CT generated data, and any other appropriate papers (see the list of publications here https://mecheng.ucl.ac.uk/hip-ct/publications/ ) and any resources you use (e.g. Google Neuroglancer, Siemens Healthineers).
• While the experiment A Form automatically grants access to view others’ data on the data repository, it is important to note that users are not authorized to access and use others’ data without their explicit consent. Please consult with one of the HOAHub Executive Committee members (i.e. PD Lee lee@ucl.ac.uk) if you have any questions or concerns.
• Please check with one of the HOAHub Executive Committee (i.e. PD Lee lee@ucl.ac.uk) before publication to make ensure no conflict of interest with other collaborators (or to resolve any conflict).
• Please provide one of the HOAHub Executive Committee (i.e. PD Lee lee@ucl.ac.uk) a pdf copy after publication.

For the avoidance of doubt, the data are only to be accessed by you and your research group on a need-to-know basis and only for the purposes of complementary and/or collaborative research, including publication and dissemination.

Your continued use of HOAHub/HiP-CT data implies your acceptance of the aforementioned rules.

 Ideally data will be shared via Dropbox or neuroglancer.

Once the data is placed on the human-organ-atlas.esrf.eu it is freely available, but we’d still appreciate your following the above if at all possible.