Dear all,
This question is mainly directed towards others involved in the life sciences, but others may also have input.
How do you tackle conducting practical research if you do not have access to lab space? Until now, I have mainly limited myself to review articles (in part) due to this limitation. For anatomy, I am able to do some dissections, but practical molecular work is impossible.
I was wondering how other people approach this.
Nice to hear that you’re aiming to do some experimental work as part of your independent research. So far I’ve mostly concentrated on computational work but am starting to establish collaborations with researchers who have labs to facilitate experimental work in future.
As an alternative to collaborations, you could look at biohacker spaces (the bio version of the more common makerspace). I think they will vary a lot in how well they are equipped, but I’ve heard those attached to universities have a lot of resources (e.g. this at UPenn) but I guess they could have affiliation requirements. You might find some more resources about this at the Global Community Bio Summit.
If you have a bit of funding you could also try outsourcing the experiment on Science Exchange. Clustermarket is similar, although I think they focus a bit more on facilitating renting lab/equipment time rather than outsourcing.
Please do share any solutions you find Jelle 
Great question! I wasn’t sure whether I should revive this topic or create a new one with title “Access to computing clusters?”
I would argue that the question still holds: I’m only experimenting in silico and I was wondering if IGDORE members could benefit from some practical access to computing resources (sorry, for ethical reasons, I don’t want to use Amazon services).
I’m currently working on a reproducibility project [1] in the field of the life sciences; it’s basically the scaled up version of [2] and I cannot analyze a 370M data file (let alone many of these) on my personal laptop.
As an alum with the Recurse Center, I’m lucky and grateful that I can use the Heap Community Cluster. It’s been really helpful (see, e.g., [3]) but now I’d like to upgrade their Ubuntu at least to 20.04.6 LTS (so I can run Python 3.9) and it’s not clear I can do it myself or get it done in the very near future.
What do you independent researchers use when you need a (HPC) cluster?
Thank you,
Marianne
What do you independent researchers use when you need a (HPC) cluster?
Interesting question @mkcor! Some researchers have used their IGDORE affiliation to apply for time at labs that operate as user facilities (like national physics labs). So it would be interesting if the same is possible for HPC time. But I’ve managed to do all my computational work on my laptop so far, and I’m not sure what the usual procedure is for getting access to HPC resources. If there are national or European facilities that have calls for proposals, then it might be possible to list an IGDORE affiliation on an application.
I will follow as this is of interest to me. I would suggest to contact super computer facilities and ask for the conditions. Data storage is also a problem that I can see. What should we do if we have 20TB data or more?
If the file size is too big for the memory, there might be some options. For example, load only chunks of the file into the data memory, work with yield.
I got a bit curious. Allocations | NAISS Naiss writes:
For Small proposals, the applicant must be at least a doctoral student at an eligible Swedish institution. To qualify for Medium and Large proposals, the applicant must be at least an assistant professor at an eligible Swedish institution.
Rounds: https://supr.naiss.se/round/
The question is if IGDORE could become eligible and its scientists would be accepted to enter the rounds as we don’t have necessarily assistant prof titles. 
Yes, that’s exactly my question! I stumbled across this initiative, specifically targeted at Covid-19 research: European HPC ecosystem rallies to support the fight against COVID-19 - PRACE I’d be curious to know whether some independent researchers were able to benefit from it.
Perhaps this could be a question for the RDA.
Yes, I’m currently studying Parallel computing with Dask (in Python)… 
As a completely independent researcher, probably not. But a lot of EU level calls are open to any type, not just academic, organization based in the EU. For instance, on the (now closed) PRACE call:
Researchers from academia, from research institutes, and from commercial organizations (industry) based in Europe are eligible to apply.
ISIDORe is another EU level program that provides a range services for infectious diseases research, and they only require:
Applicants must be affiliated to an organisation in the European Union. Applications from user groups with a majority of users working outside EU are eligible, though limits may be applied (max 20% of the total access available).
So IGDORE affiliates should be eligible to apply for these sorts of EU programs (but always good to check the exact requirements of each)
National level programs are often more restrictive. @gudlot, I looked into NAISS and they write:
To apply for these resources, the PI must therefore hold an appointment of at least 60 percent at a Swedish university or research institution recognised by the Swedish Research Council.
IGDORE isn’t yet approved by VR, but we are working on it 