manage-a-research-collaboration

name	manage-a-research-collaboration
category	school
description	Manage a research collaboration through shared questions, contribution agreements, ethical authority, version control, conflict handling, and publication decisions. Use when several people or institutions jointly produce research.

manage-a-research-collaboration

Make authority, credit, care, and evidence explicit before pressure rises.

When to use

• Use across disciplines, institutions, communities, countries, or career stages.
• Do not treat funding, seniority, data ownership, or administration as automatic authorship.

Preconditions

• Identify partners, communities, funders, institutions, ethics approvals, agreements, data, risks, and decision authority.

Procedure

1. Write a collaboration charter covering purpose, scope, values, roles, decisions, communication, resources, and review.
2. Map legal, ethics, community, data, intellectual-property, confidentiality, export, and publication authority.
3. Define expected contributions and revisit authorship, acknowledgment, and order throughout the work.
4. Establish repositories, naming, versioning, access, provenance, analysis, and backup rules.
5. Set meeting cadence, decision records, issue escalation, safe dissent, conflict disclosure, and recusal.
6. Track milestones, dependencies, capacity, changes, and support for junior or marginalized contributors.
7. Define review, release, correction, withdrawal, departure, dispute, and closeout processes.
8. Periodically audit whether practice matches the charter and repair inequities.

Failure plan

• If ethics or data authority conflicts, stop affected work until authorized governance resolves it.
• If a contributor faces retaliation or unsafe power, use an independent escalation route.

Worked example

Three universities and a community organization share decision rights, record local data authority, revisit credit after fieldwork, and preserve a community review without granting factual veto.

Done

• A collaboration charter and status report record roles, authority, contributions, ethics, data, decisions, conflicts, milestones, publication, and departures
• Contribution, access, consent, version, recusal, safe-escalation, authorship, and closeout checks verify accountable operation