Global survey of microscopy core facilities

As part of two open international core facility surveys focused on microscopy and flow cytometry, we obtained an in-depth snapshot of their state-of-play. Here we focus on microscopy cores across 'the Americas', 'Asia Pacific' and 'Europe and Africa' with responses from 241 facilities. We compared instrument types and numbers, staffing, user fees, funding, etc. This revealed both remarkable similarities and notable differences. For example, the staff/instrument ratio in Europe and Africa was smaller compared to other regions World View and Asia Pacific had a larger proportion of electron microscopes. Importantly, we want to emphasise that the anonymised raw data is made available for anyone to do their own further mining and analysis, including cross-correlations and constrained groupings. This survey will serve as an essential baseline for future longitudinal studies following trends across all metrics as our facilities evolve.