Collaboration: bringing NN members together: topic
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A 'pre-nup' for collaborations?
Corie Lok
Wednesday, 09 April 2008 19:01 UTC
There’s a news feature from this week’s Nature about how collaborations can go bad, ending up in disputes about data ownership, publications and even lawsuits. The story gets into the idea of collaborators signing a sort of ‘pre-nuptial’ agreement to try to avoid potential conflicts.
What do you think? Has anyone here experienced collaborations that ended badly? What was the cause? How were the conflicts resolved?
Would you sign a prenup?
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Replies
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Keep the data open and CC license it and you’re in good shape :)
But seriouslt, if you make the barrier to entry too high, people will stop collaborating. Look at what litigation has done to the medical system in the US. Should we take actions based on the 5% of bad cases or the vast majority of successful collaborations?
Now of course, if at some point of time there is a clear indication that you’re headed into a situation which might involve forming a company or some other form of monetary compensation, etc, then you’d be wise to get lawyers involved, but not when you’re just busy trying to figure out a cool scientific problem.
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I don’t usually have that much riding on collaborations (at least, not materially) but to avoid hurt feelings and resentments, I take advice I was given.
Once we have come to some agreement, usually verbally, I send an e-mail with copies to the other interested parties, recapitulating what I understood us to have discussed. This leaves a sort of written trace which to date has sufficed to remind people of the obligations they undertook.
It’s usually pretty informal but I think it’s better to be explicit if it is important to you. On the order of, “as we discussed, if all this pans out, our students should share first authorship”.
So, it’s not a formal pre-nup, but then I’ve never been faced with an ownership or money-related issue. It usually takes care of authorship issues. Keeping a [keyword] at the beginning of those collaboration-related e-mails helps make sure they all come to light when write-up time arrives.
Well! I see someone has been a lot more organized than I.
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There is a forum at the News and Opinion group in which people can provide feedback, from their own experiences, for the proposed OECD template for international collaborations.
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Fascinating !!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to access the feature flagged up by Corie :-(
I commenced Manuscript collaborations about a year ago involving about a dozen researchers/scientists from around the world. No problems (touch wood).
Manu #1 was published in Precedings in Dec.
I can fully connect generally with what Heather said. The main issue for me is simply to hopefully get these Manu’s published. I can only go from personal experience and advice received but getting to know and trust collaborators you’ve never met BEFORE work gets underway I would say is essential.
Keeping ‘the team’ in the loop has been helpful as has been including the ed-in-chief of the Journals were submitting to. I am too naive to know if the latter is the norm, but they’ve most appreciated this from my experience.
One of the reasons I was attracted to NN was to learn from the community so posts like this are really helpful.
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