What is the purpose of a NPUA?

The agreement refers to the Technical Scopes of Work (TSW) or other collaboration agreement(s) that each institution has with Fermilab (or with an experimental team working at Fermilab) for collaborating on specific experiments associated with the Fermilab Accelerator Complex or CMS. This includes collaborations that are working on new experimental proposals that are targeted for Fermilab. A single NPUA covers all users from a single institution, regardless of the number of collaborations or experiments.

Yet, we do not actually attach each of the collaboration agreements to the NPUA. Instead, we treat the NPUA as an umbrella or master agreement that addresses matters like liability and intellectual property, without rewriting all the existing collaboration and experimental documents that we have successfully used for years.

We treat the existing Statements of Work or Collaboration Agreements that your institution has already signed to join one of these approved experiments as Appendices.  We associate these agreements electronically with the NPUA as part of the onboarding process of the individual participants, but do not actually attach the physical documents to the NPUA itself.