Collaborations and team grants

Pretty much at every stage of my career there have been team grants of some kind, offered by institutions, states, federal agencies, industrial funders, what have you. The idea behind these sounds good: "Collaborations encourage creativity and interdisciplinary science, which is good. If we mandate that people must be co-PIs to get money, we can encourage collaborations." In practice, many team grants turn out to be ways that two or more PIs can fund their individual research on a theme that vaguely connects the two or more groups which really a collaboration. Being honest, I've done this too. Money is money, and sometimes even if we plan to work together if the funding comes through, there is already momentum on the solo projects, while the joint project has to start from scratch.

In my experience, successful collaborations rarely start out through formal mechanisms. Usually, I am talking to someone informally about my work (or theirs), and while chatting, we have an idea for an experiment/calculation/analysis that one of us can do on the other person's problem. Sometimes, my collaborations have started when my students have done something similar. In any case, all of my successful collaborations have started from one experiment and grown from there. In the best cases, the single experiment grows into a new approach on a problem that neither of us can tackle alone (even better if we can then get joint money for it!). Always, though, the working together starts BEFORE the joint proposal, not as a happy outcome of writing a joint proposal. 

I won't say that team grants are a terrible idea, since once a collaboration begins, they are an excellent way to fund research that might be hard to get funded in other ways. Nor do I think that multi-PI grants that end up as separate projects along a theme are necessarily bad. I just don't think that anyone is really served by pretending that team grants produce collaborative science, rather than being an opportunity to support something that is already there.

International collaborations

I may be about to start one. It is with someone in another country very far away. We have minimal funding to do this, but we are both starting out on the TT (or local equivalent) and are interested in the science. We have met face to face before at meetings, and this person is a well known and well liked former group mate of one of my current colleagues.

Because of the distance (and lack of funds), we are starting out just sending materials back and forth. The cost of FedEx does add up, though, especially to Far Away. We are hoping to get some nice preliminary data we can then use to get joint funding, and have more actual interactions between the groups. I am not sure how this will work out in the end, since I have never done an international collaboration like this before. For all the talk about how much "smaller" or "flatter" the world is, I really don't see it. I mean Skype is free, but transportation is not. I have done coast to coast in the US, but international shipping rates and airfares are much, much higher (even for the same distance). In the past, I have seen my collaborators from the other coast at least once a year. Not sure how an electronic only collaboration will go.

Who is an author?

I've been thinking about this issue today because I am having a disagreement with a collaborator about the author list of a paper. This collaborator considers themselves to be "strict" with authorship. I think they are being a total jerk. Our disagreement is over the status of technician on a paper.

At National Lab, like at a university, the PI gets to decide who is an author. My inclination, which is how things worked in my branch at National Lab is to list everyone who contributed to the work as an author. This means that technicians are authors, not just listed in the acknowledgements. This is different from the definition of an inventor for patent purposes (an inventor has to have made an intellectual contribution, which may or may not be true of a technician, depending on the tech and the lab). My collaborator (from a different branch at National Lab) prefers to use the inventor rules for authorship, and relegates everyone else (even some of the people who actually generated the data) to acknowledgments.

Thus the argument--I want my technician listed as an author. Collaborator wants my technician in the acknowledgements only. My technician took data that is critical to the paper, which I think earns authorship. My technician did this under my direction, and followed my protocols without changes, which my collaborator thinks means no intellectual contribution (and for a patent, they would be right). This was a joint project, so we are co-PIs, and I can't just override their objections. I am hoping to end this disagreement quickly (and amicably, but since I am no longer at National Lab, I will fight pretty hard for my tech, especially since collaborator will have limited opportunity to screw me over in the future).

The broader question of who is an author is interesting to me as a new TT prof. I've been in labs where authorship was treated as a prize to be handed out. All morality aside, this leads to awful group dynamics. But making everyone in the group an author is just as bad--why work when you can expand the CV for nothing? I've also been in groups where the bar to authorship is pretty high, and this can lead to reluctance to help out a groupmate with something time consuming. I've been fortunate to work mostly with people who are upfront about authorship rules, and don't renege at the end. I've heard many horror stories, though.

I am in a sub-field where collaboration is the norm, since our experiments require multiple disparate areas of expertise. A typical paper in my research area will have 3 to 10 co-authors. My own philosophy is to give proper credit as much as possible, both for ethical reasons, and because I find that people are far more willing to work with me when they know they will be properly credited. In my group, I keep track of what everyone is working on, and I also encourage my students to let me know when someone has made a substantial contribution that might be invisible to me as the PI so we give proper credit where credit is due. After leaving National Lab, I see how truly important this is, since I need to trust that my former colleagues will do the right thing with the projects I left behind. In my previous collaborations, each PI submitted a list of contributors in order of importance, and that combined list became the author list. I see now that I will need to discuss this issue right up front, since fighting about it at the endpoint is a real drain.

Old data and moving on

I have three more publications planned to write up from my old National Lab. All of the data is relatively old, and some is ancient. I've decided to get this done this summer, so I can remove this as clutter from my brain. The extra publications on my CV won't hurt either!

It is kind of bittersweet--I am just about done with the most interesting of the three. This is data I took 5 years ago that is really exciting, but difficult to interpret. We always intended/tried to get some theoreticians on board to help us figure out why we see what we see, but it never worked out for various reasons. The funding ended, and so did the project, though the results are still interesting and novel 5 years later. So now I am writing it for a really good specialty journal, rather than a top-tier discipline-wide one. I really want the data to see the light of day. I am just about done with the first draft manuscript, mostly cleaning it up to send on to my old collaborators at National Lab. I am falling in love with my old data again, seeing why I always wanted to try to explain it better and try for a top tier journal. At the same time, I clearly need to move on to the things my lab is focusing on, so I am not sad to finally get a publication out of it.

Project #2 is similar--nice data that would have benefited from some additional measurements that were never made. This one should go into a good journal for my field, and I will write it as such, since this is the sub-area in which I am best known. Although this is not a major thrust in my new lab, I need to keep publishing in this sub-area because I will likely find very strong people to write letters in support of my tenure bid in this area. I have one student working on something related, so I am looking to see if there are any last measurements my student can do to improve what I already have.

Project #3 is really ancient--the last data was taken six years ago at the tail end of another project. I don't really need to write this one, but I had two summer (undergrad) REU students who worked on it, one of whom is now in a PhD program. I would like to get it done for them, even though it might not even be worth the effort, and will likely go to a minor specialty journal. I feel guilty enough as it is that I never got around to finishing this up. But data is data, and papers are papers, so I will probably spend a week or so on it. It also seems a shame to have data that tells a complete story (no matter how minor and unimportant to me now) go to waste.

I wonder how many projects like these get lost in the shuffle? How much interesting (and already paid for in money and blood) data is sitting in people's old lab notebooks?

Breaking up with a collaborator

Managing collaborations is one aspect of science I find difficult. Social skills do not come easy to me in general, so I feel a little out of my element. I am not talking about the science part--the data discussions, the planning, the experimental designs. That part is all fun. I am talking about the social/political side.

In a collaboration, like in a friendship or romance, one day you can just realize you are just going through the motions. The science may be interesting, but the collaboration isn't working anymore. Maybe you are doing too much of the heavy lifting. Maybe your interests or goals have drifted apart. Maybe the work of maintaining a long distance relationship is no longer balanced by the benefits, or the specialized knowledge your collaborator had is now available in your lab. At that point, it might be time to end it. Especially for me now, newly on the TT when I am trying to establish myself for tenure, I can't afford to have collaborations in name only. Sure, I get some extra papers (maybe) as a middle author from their lab, but I need to have papers that are from my lab alone, and that makes the bar for collaboration a little higher, especially for work that doesn't require specialized knowledge or equipment.

It is hard to let go. I find myself wondering if I made the right decision. In the short term, we are now racing to finish a set of experiments before they do something similar. In the long term, the door is still open to work together again, but I am pretty sure it won't be on this particular project. So for today, I am letting myself wallow in doubt and loss, and tomorrow I will pick myself up and get cracking on the science!