Collaborative research

Large-scale and collaborative research is increasingly common, with projects often involving multiple institutions, disciplines and countries. This creates additional data management challenges, including coordinating access, aligning policies, managing shared infrastructure and ensuring consistent practices across partners.

Effective collaboration requires agreed frameworks and shared coordination mechanisms established early in the project.

Coordinating data management across partners

In collaborative projects, partners should agree on:

• common data management approaches and standards
• shared procedures for documentation and version control
• how access to shared data will be managed
• how data sharing and preservation responsibilities will be coordinated.

These agreements are often captured in collaboration agreements, data management plans or project governance documentation.

Data inventories for coordination

Producing a data inventory helps collaborative projects keep track of datasets, documentation and responsibilities across multiple partners.

An inventory can help record:

• what data exist and how they were created
• where data are stored
• ownership and access conditions
• responsible contacts
• sharing and preservation plans.

Inventories support coordination, transparency and long-term stewardship and make it easier to prepare data for deposit and reuse.

We have developed an example data inventory in line with the requirements for effective data management which is structured as a Microsoft Access database.

Shared standards and frameworks

Collaborative projects benefit from adopting shared data management standards and frameworks. These may include:

• documentation templates
• file naming and version control conventions
• data quality and transcription standards
• security and confidentiality procedures
• consent and governance templates.

Using consistent standards reduces duplication of effort and improves data quality across partners.

Infrastructure planning for collaboration

Collaborative projects often rely on shared infrastructure for storing and accessing data during active research.

Planning should consider:

• where shared data will be stored during the project
• how partners will access common resources
• how security and backups will be managed
• how responsibilities are distributed across institutions.

Detailed guidance on collaborative storage and file-sharing tools is provided in the Managing data during the project section of the learning hub for data producers.

Resource coordination

Many research centres and large projects maintain shared resource libraries that bring together policies, templates and guidance related to data management and sharing. Centralising these materials helps promote consistent practice and supports the onboarding of new project members.