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Questions for Scientific Collaborators
Although each research project has unique features, certain core issues are common to most of them and can be addressed by collaborators posing the following questions:
Overall Goals
- What are the scientific issues, goals, and anticipated outcomes or products of the collaboration?
- When is the project over?
Who Will Do What?
- What are the expected contributions of each participant?
- Who will write any progress reports and final reports?
- How, and by whom, will personnel decisions be made? How and by whom will personnel be supervised?
- How and by whom will data be managed? How will access to data be managed? How will you handle long-term storage and access to data after the project is complete?
Authorship, Credit
- What will be the criteria and the process for assigning authorship and credit?
- How will credit be attributed to each collaborator’s institution for public presentations, abstracts, and written articles?
- How and by whom will public presentations be made?
- How and by whom will media inquiries be handled?
- When and how will you handle intellectual property and patent applications?
Contingencies & Communicating
- What will be your mechanism for routine communications among members of the research team (to ensure that all appropriate members of the team are kept fully informed of relevant issues)?
- How will you decide about redirecting the research agenda as discoveries are made?
- How will you negotiate the development of new collaborations and spin-off projects, if any?
- Should one of the principals of the research team move to another institution or leave the project, how will you handle, data, specimens, lab books, and authorship and credit?
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