Facilitating Collaboration: Early research sharing and communication
Goals
- Demonstrate that collaboration within and among teams can improve outcomes and reproducibility of basic and translational research
- Reduce the burden of collaborative and open research by introducing the new role of Editorial Facilitator in team-based research
- Facilitate the early release, accessibility, and context of research findings to the larger research community
- Develop infrastructure for a workspace and credit system that tracks and incentivizes collaboration
Deliverables
Three components will be designed to facilitate, communicate, and credit collaboration within and among teams, in a common workspace such as Google Docs:
- Editorial facilitator (PhD-level subject expert) as team member to make connections among researchers and communicate findings to the widest possible audience
- Continually updated narrative describing the team’s incremental and null results, contextualized in accordance with the field’s latest published evidence
- Snapshots of the team’s early research as cited in the narrative, as preprints or other fully open repository with commenting functionality
Development and delivery of these components are aligned with companion projects proposed within ICOR — e.g., ROMS & PIDs for tracking research results, recognition and review of early preprint postings, a credit system to quantify nano-contributions and collaborative behaviors, and a reputation system that incentivizes and rewards researchers’ collaborative behaviors.
What’s Needed
- Funded research teams (at least 3) that have agreed to collaborate, preferably transdisciplinary
- Google Docs or other workspace where teams can share, discuss, and offer preliminary assessments of each others’ work, and if necessary, tech/design team to ensure the workspace coordinates with tracking technology (per ROMS below) that delivers results, notifications, and credits
- ROMS or similar technology for logging early research metadata, and for tracking revisions and usage of early findings within the workspace, preprint or other open servers, and ultimately published venues
- Subject matter experts, preferably with editorial and/or facilitation experience, to serve as workspace facilitators & narrators (w. seed funding or pro bono)
- Preprint server partner with ability to connect the living narrative and its cited research snapshots
- Dedicated reviewers of early and open outcomes and accompanying living narrative
Links
Supporters
Jessica Polka, Dario Alessi, Aled Edwards, Missy Cummings, Dick Wilder, Damian Pattinson