Collaborations at the European or US level are generally orchestrated via grants from government or foundation agencies (the European Commission, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, etc). When such agencies put out calls for proposals, focus groups (scientists known to each other, say, via societies and conferences) are likely to be first responders. The calls are usually tightly aligned with particular research areas and are often quite prescriptive. When core groups do not have sufficient expertise, additional project partners are invited from their peer groups to bridge the gaps, or wider calls for participation are put out to the community (it is not uncommon for ‘brokering’ companies to do this), soliciting additional scientists, or in-kind contributors, who bring hardware platforms, software packages, or other accessory contributions. The same principles apply to establishing collaborations in Africa, where researchers, having worked together previously, reunite to submit collaborative proposals. In bioinformatics, there have been informal interactions between geographically distributed groups through the African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, which runs a conference every 2 years, and more formal partnerships via the H3ABioNet Pan African bioinformatics network.
Ultimately, assembling a team requires balancing the requisite expertise with an appropriate number of partners, so that each receives realistic and sufficient funds to be able to deliver the tasks at hand (as detailed in a contract of work). It is important to try to achieve equity, and to ensure that each partner adheres to their required contributions so that others don’t have to carry their load. All partners should have clearly defined roles, should feel like they belong and that their contributions are essential.
European grants are highly structured, broken down into a series of interdependent ‘work packages’, each of which has one or more leads, plus a set of participants with expertise relevant to the work package theme. Partners can contribute to more than one work package, although leading more than one is generally discouraged. The leads are responsible for ensuring that their tasks get done; along the way, they are required to commit to specific deliverables, documented via detailed milestones, upon which they are required to report (in writing) at regular intervals - often quarterly. The project coordinator’s responsibility is to collate all of the mid-term reports, to compile an annual report (detailing the scientific achievements and the project’s financial status), and to submit them to the Commission for review.
Results of European projects may be published at the level of individual work packages and/or of the whole consortium. Consortium-level papers include all project partners; those emanating from work packages will depend on the policy of the lead(s): e.g., whether they adhere to strict authorship policies (See section on Published Rules Regarding Authorship), in terms of who contributed to the study design, who did the work, wrote the paper, etc., or whether they simply include all named work-package participants, regardless of their individual contributions. Authorship and the order of inclusion should be agreed upon prior to the completion of the paper to avoid later disagreements.
Collaborations within (fee-based) membership organisations (like ISCB, GOBLET, EMBnet, ISB, etc.) function a little differently, although there are clear overlaps. Membership of such organisations may be at the level either of individuals (as is typical of societies like ISCB and ISB) or of institutions or groups spread across the globe (as is the case for Foundations like GOBLET and EMBnet). Members generally contribute to the work of these organisations as volunteers, and the projects they undertake are most often not funded by granting agencies. The projects, and interactions between participants, therefore tend to be more fluid, driven more by people’s bandwidths than by tight deliverable or reporting deadlines - projects thus tend to grow and shrink according to the time people have available to contribute.
Results from collaborations like this may also be published at project- or full-consortium levels. Here, consortium-level papers are likely to include all current members of the organisation; papers resulting from focused interest groups within the consortium, on the other hand, are likely to depend on the collective decision of the project participants (whether to include authors strictly according to their specific input, or whether simply to include everyone who expressed an interest, regardless of their actual contributions).
Some fee-based organisations operate at a national rather than institutional or individual level: in ELIXIR for example, countries within Europe (and beyond), may become members on payment of an annual national subscription fee. Here, collaborative projects are likely to be funded either by the organisation’s central administration (or ‘hub’) or by separate grants held by groups of member countries (these may or may not be coordinated by the central administrative hub). Inevitably, national consortia like this involve many additional (often rather convoluted) levels of management: policies and processes regarding who may contribute to which project, and how individual contributions to resulting publications are recognised, are therefore likely to be much more bureaucratic.
Running large collaborative networks can be challenging, as inevitably there tend to be some key contributors and some “passengers”. Having clearly defined roles and deliverables for each member is essential, as is a clear process to follow for lack of delivery. Large consortium publications can be difficult to manage fairly owing to the limited level of granularity for defining author roles and contributions offered by some journals. However, it is important to try to represent diverse author contributions adequately, to ensure recognition for those who put in the most effort.