The ABRF group has kindly provided me with the recording of the service contract session form the April 2024 meeting in Minneapolis for the ChUG podcast. Here it is!

One point of the discussion that stuck with me during the session is when a member of the audience started talking about the researchers point of view in this equation. Service contracts for core facility instruments are very much negotiated between the cores and the manufacturers, and the voice of the researchers is not necessarily heard very loudly in the process. So if you are a user of the CAT Facility, I want you to know that you should definitely share your thoughts about the service on our equipment and its impact on the progress of your research. We aim to keep the costs of service and maintenance as low as possible, but we should not do so at the expense of the actual research, which is the very purpose of our activities here!