key_elements.md

Learning Objectives:

LO2a: Learn what major types of collaborative platforms are available and what the use cases for each might be (knowledge).

LO2b: Be able to use a variety of collaborative research platforms (tasks).

Key components:

• Principles of collaborative research.

• Documentation as conversation and collaboration.

• Version control, organising repositories, and project management (GitHub, Git, Zenodo).

• Virtual Research Environments (VRE) on the horizon (e.g., EU projects on VREs).

• Website and content management.

• Collaborative writing platforms.

• Collective annotation services.

• Community spaces and communication tools.

Who to involve:

• Individuals: Andy Byers, Anna Krystalli, Julien Colomb, Rutger Vos.

• Organisations: Center for Open Science (COS), Overleaf, PaperHive, Hypothesis, Authorea, protocols.io (Anjuli Manche), European Grid Infrastructure (Tiziana Ferrari), Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO).

• Other: EU projects on VREs: BlueBridgeVRE (Donatella Castelli), VRE4EIC, H2020 EVEREST,

Key resources:

Tools

• Mozilla Science study group lessons.

  • Working Open Workshop, Mozilla Science Lab.

• Overleaf, Authorea, PaperHive, Figshare, ScienceOpen, Hypothes.is, Protocols.io.

• Open Science Framework (OSF), Center for Open Science (COS).

• ScholarlyHub, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Humanities Commons.

• Discipline-specific platform examples:

  • NMR Lipids Project: Collaboration platform to find a lipid force field that matches NMR order parameters. Synapse: open source, free to use, goals of enabling open science and collaborative research in real-time, integrates with R/Python via analytic clients, and has advanced data access controls for sharing human subjects data.

  • HackMD: can be used to clean up other collaboratively written documents before conversion to markdown files and archived in GitHub.

  • Leishmaniasis Virtual Laboratory.

  • The Open Source Malaria project.

  • Benchling.

  • Tools for open geospatial science course (NCSU).

• Google docs (and sheets and slides).

• CRediT, defining contributor roles in research outputs (CASRAI).

• Quartzy, a lab management platform.

Research Articles and Reports

• Virtual research environment collaborative landscape study (Carusi and Reimer, 2010; JISC)

• Virtual research environments: An overview and research agenda (Candela et al., 2013).

• Creating and maintaining high-performance collaborative research teams: the importance of diversity and interpersonal skills (Cheruvelil et al., 2014).

• Collaborative research and development (R&D) for climate technology transfer and uptake in developing countries: Towards a needs driven approach (Ockwell et al., 2014).

• Multinational teams and diseconomies of scale in collaborative research (Hsiehchen et al., 2015).

• Ten simple rules for establishing international research collaborations (de Grijs, 2015).

• Collaborative research and the co-production of knowledge for practice: an illustrative case study (Heaton et al., 2016).

• Current reflections on collaborative and engaged research (Rodrigues et al., 2017).

Key Posts

• Six new projects on e-Infrastructure for virtual research environments, European Commission (2015).

• Baby steps for the open-curious, Christie Bahlai.

Other

• Friendly GitHub Intro, Kirstie Jane.

• Open Science ASAP.

• OSF YouTube archive, OSF webinar series, and OSF Help Guide.

• Free & Interactive Online Introduction to LaTeX, Overleaf.

Tasks:

• Create a GitHub account, and create your first repo with a license and readme file. Use your new account to login to Zenodo and preserve any GitHub repos. Connect with your ORCID profile too.

  • Push different data formats in GitHub (e.g. CSV, SVG) and see what happens.

  • Find a GitHub repo that a colleague has created. Make changes or comments collaboratively, and inspect the differences.

  • Tag the releases and backup to Zenodo.

• Create an OSF collaborative environment from data to publication.

  • Connect your OSF project to GitHub.

  • Upload any raw code, images, data, tables to project.

  • Obtain a DOI and ARK identifier for your project.

• Use PaperHive, PubPeer, or Hypothes.is to comment on (annotate) any research article of your choice.

  • Consider doing this as part of a regular preprint journal club.

• Create a ScienceOpen/Figshare collection on your favourite research topic.

• Begin a new article draft using an Overleaf template. Clone this article with GitHub.