Management meeting: Fuerteventura, Feb. 11, 2014

The fourth MINSC management meeting was held following the mid term review of the MINSC project in Fuerteventura.

After presentations by the fellows and discussions with the PIs, the representative from the European Commission, Piotr Kasprzyk, recommended that the PIs request addition of new associated partners to the network. Some fellows may spend time on secondment at these associated partners and it will avoid problems in the event of an audit in the future if these institutes are added now. The project manager is to contact these potential associated partners to ask them to send the coordinator an expression of interest which the coordinator will then transfer to the project officer.

Piotr also explained that some of the fellows had expressed difficulties in finding accommodations in their host countries. He suggested that PIs should try to set up some sort of assistance for these fellows on their arrival in the host country. One of the PIs suggested that this system may already be in place for Erasmus students and could be extended to Marie Curie fellows.

During the management meeting, the coordinator explained the cost calculation for publication of a special issue of Mineralogical Magazine with Open Access articles. All PIs agreed that authors would be invoiced individually prior to publication.

The coordinator also reminded all PIs that the first financial report for the MINSC project will be due in August 2014. Several of the PIs pointed out that the financial offices at their institutes often close down for several weeks over the summer and that this may create delays in reporting. The project manager is to send a reminder to all partners in May so that they can encourage their financial offices to start working on the financial report ASAP.

The next MINSC network meeting is scheduled as part of a large scale, multi network meeting to be held in Iceland in August 2014. Currently, University of Iceland and Reykjavik Energy have made tentative bookings for the group. Once the exact costs have been caculated, a registration fee will be determined for participation in the event and individual invoices will be sent to the MINSC participants.

PIs requested that invoices for participation in MINSC network events be sent as soon as possible after the events to avoid delays with accounting at their host institutes. The coordinator explained that the delays in re-invoicing for the previous MINSC events were due to unforeseen circumstances at Uni Leeds (people out maternity leave, sick leave or unexpected resignations) but the finance office is now once again fully staffed and invoices should be issued in a timely manner.

The coordinator asked all PIs for their feedback on this network event, co-run with the CO2 React network. Feedback was very positive and PIs indicated that increasing the exposure of fellows to fellows from other networks could potentially lead to future collaborations between networks. They also agreed that certain training events at future network meetings might be targeted to fellows from one or the other network where appropriate rather than to all fellows from both networks.