The MAJOR RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE FACILITIES (MRI's), participating in HYDRALAB have agreed to use one common User Selection Procedure. This procedure is followed by a User Selection Panel (USP) consisting of five to eight members, a minority coming from the Facility Operators and a majority of independent experts in the fields covered by the Facilities of HYDRALAB. The independent experts for a particular USP will be selected in such a way as to insure that they have no involvement whatsoever with any of the proposals to be reviewed.

For the proposal acceptance a majority agreement of the USP-members is required. In case of non-acceptance of the proposal the proposer will be informed by a letter including a summary of comments made by the USP in order to revise the proposal. The proposal can be submitted again to the MRI, unless the user selection panel has decided that the proposal had to be rejected unconditionally, or the drafted short list already exceeds the total amount of access available. The MRI will distribute the revised proposal to the other USP-members for final evaluation.

The User Selection Panel will draft a short list of User Groups to be granted access which will be sent to the European Commission DG XII for approval within one month. Upon receipt of this approval (no reply from the EC will be interpreted as approval) the User Groups will be informed.