The Collaborative Science group aims to create and share resources to help early career researchers (ECR) engage in successful collaborations. Collaborations are a useful way for ECRs to learn new skills, increase their visibility, improve productivity, gain independence from their PIs and increase their professional network. However, many ECRs are unaware of the benefits of collaborations, and training materials to help ECRs develop many of the soft-skills and techniques that make collaborations successful are not widely available.

We are creating and sharing qualitative and quantitative interviews and surveys with ECRs to learn about the barriers to succeeding in collaborations and the techniques they have found most useful for collaborating.

We have already gathered 50 responses for a qualitative survey among eLife ambassadors and their colleagues. These responses will be used to improve upon and finalize a quantitative survey that will be shared internationally and will be incorporated into a series of blog articles and a training webinar to share some of the ‘Rules of Collaborations’ with ECRs world-wide.

We expect to analyze our qualitative interview responses, draft a blog article series and add content to our webinar/presentation by the end of 2019 and would welcome help with any and all of these activities.

Members involved in this initiative:
Stephanie Moon, Susann Auer, Shawn Tan, Ding He, Hossein Khiabanian, Laurent Paardekooper, Gosia Gazda, Natalia Bielczyk, Sara Ahrabi, Sarvenaz Sarabipour, Nnaemeka Nnadi, Helen Jiao, Sveta Chakrabarti