Procedure

• Incoming proposals are reviewed by a member of the MESS Board of Overseers. The reviewer is appointed by the Chair of this Board. Occasionally, the Chair will consult external referees.

• On the basis of one or more referee report(s), the Board of Overseers will take one of three decisions: accept, revise and resubmit, or reject. This decision and the referee report(s) are communicated to the researcher(s) who submitted the proposal between one and (at most) three months after submission.

• Once a research proposal has been accepted, the MESS staff will confer with the researcher to coordinate the timing of the field work in the panel.

• After completing the field work, the data are delivered to the researcher within one month or, in case of complex data, within a period mutually agreed. In principle one month after this delivery, the data is made available to academic researchers through the LISS data website.