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One voice for the light source community
Lightsources.org is the result of a collaboration between communicators from 25 member organisations around the world. Together, they represent 30 light source facilities, 23 synchrotrons and 7 Free Electron Lasers (FELs). These are spread across 3 geographic zones: Europe / the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia / Australia. In addition, Lightsources.org is supporting activities that are underway to promote the benefits and capabilities of light sources to scientists, science organisations and stakeholders on the African continent.
Our website is a global resource, providing information and updates about light sources research and achievements, and opportunities for careers and international collaboration. This is made possible by financial support from the member facilities, whose contributions enable further promotion and international coverage of their innovations and capabilities.
Light sources are large science facilities that create hubs of research and technical expertise. Scientists from both academia and industry can access and exploit the light produced in the form of beams of X-rays, Ultra-Violet and Infrared. The scale of their impact can be evidenced in the output. Since the collaboration’s member facilities can online more than 175,000 unique articles*¹ have been published by the user communities and staff. Most of the light sources have capabilities in protein crystallography and there have been over 126,000 protein structures* deposited by our user communities and staff in the Worldwide Data Bank. Light sources also employ large teams of scientists, engineers, data scientists, software engineers, along with support teams that include experts in technical support, procurement, finance, legal, user support, communications and human resources. These teams currently make sup 7,300* staff spread over the 30 facilities within Lightsources.org.
*as at December 2022
¹ 21 facilities provided 125,867 unique DOIs (143,548 in total); around 12.5% of DOIs are present in more than one dataset. Additionally, 8 other facilities reported 57,264 papers but could not provide the DOIs. Based on the number of common DOIs in the dataset we estimate that out of those 57,264 papers about 50,000 articles were unique. Our conservative estimate of the total number of published papers is the rounded down sum of the two numbers (over 175,000 articles).
To learn more about the latest job opportunities within the collaboration, please visit Careers – Lightsources.org
Lightsources.org creates one voice for the field, ensuring our member facilities are well positioned for funding, access, and research, to make use of each facility’s unique capabilities, and to enhance the effectiveness of the science carried out.
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>Learn more about our collaboration