Projects are a way to group experiments based on sharing and access rights. Experiments assigned to a particular project will be available to all members of that particular project.

For example, Bob and Joe are part of the same lab group working on leukemia. They often collect flow cytometry data that they want to share with each other. In Cytobank, Bob can create a project called "leukemia project" and make himself and Joe managers of that project. When creating a new experiment on Cytobank, Bob can specify that the experiment is part of "leukemia project", and Joe will automatically get access to that experiment. Since they are both managers, Bob or Joe can decide to add new members (e.g. Sue) to their project and also decide what level of access this new member has.

The level of access that can be set for each project include:

1. Enable/disable making of new illustrations - managers can decide to allow members to make their own illustrations with the data or to allow members only to view the saved illustrations.
2. Enable/disable cloning of an experiment - managers can also decide to enable cloning files only, cloning files and illustrations, or to disable cloning entirely.

In addition to members and managers, a project can also have a leader. Project leaders are no different from project members, aside from the fact that they're called leaders.

You can assign an experiment to a project during creation or by clicking on Edit Experiment Details in the Experiment Details page.

Other things of note:

• Project managers can change project sharing/cloning settings, as well as add/delete managers, leaders, and members to a project.
  • The user who created the project will default to being a manager for the project.
  • Projects must have at least one manager.
  • Managers can change the sharing levels of a project at any time.
  • When users are added as managers to projects, they are granted full access to all experiments in that project. Likewise, when experiments are added to projects, the managers of that project are granted full access to those experiments. This is a change that occurred in Cytobank version 2.4.3. Any project updates that occurred before the 2.4.3 release of Cytobank 2.4.3 (July 22-25, 2011) will NOT result in managers having full access to experiments in projects, unless they were explicitly granted full access.
  • Project managers are designated with a "[PM]" in the Full Access Users list (displayed on the Experiment Details page).
  • Any user with full access to an experiment can remove a project manager from that experiment.
• Project leaders do not currently have any special privileges beyond those of project members.
• When a user creates or edits an experiment, this experiment can be assigned to a project. The list of projects displayed will be limited to projects that the user has access to.
• Users with full access to an experiment are NOT subject to cloning/sharing restrictions.
• Deleting a project does not delete its associated experiments.
• If cloning is disabled, file downloading is also disabled.
• Each experiment can belong to only one project, though a project can (of course) have many experiments.