Creating a Culture of Collaboration at George Washington University (C3@GWU) Utilizing the Open Science Framework (OSF)

Lotrecchiano G, Potterbusch M. Creating a Culture of Collaboration at George Washington University (C3@GWU) Utilizing the Open Science Framework (OSF). Oral presentation at 2017 SciTS Conference. Clearwater Beach, FL. Jun 14, 2017. Creating an Institutional Culture for Team Science. Online at: http://www.scienceofteamscience.org/2017-agenda.

Problem. In an effort to promote collaboration in research teams tackling complex problems, many new initiatives exist on local, regional, and national levels. Many of these stem from responses to executive and federal recommendations from agencies like the National Academies of Science (NAS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and executive orders that encourage greater collaboration within and across disciplines requiring more team-oriented scientific approaches (Bennet, Gadlin, & Levine-Finley, 2010; National Academy of Science, 2015; Obama, 2015). Our response to this charge was to develop the Creating a Culture of Collaboration at George Washington University (C3@GWU) University Seminar that convenes a crossdisciplinary community of expert faculty interested in issues related to scientific collaboration and connects them with regional and national partners and experts to explore and address topics that foster collaborative science. Its main goal is to raise awareness and scholarship around key topical areas important to collaboration and team science. In addition to encouraging individuals to interface in scholarly conversation across disciplines, schools, and institutions, which this seminar ensures, the seminar addresses a variety of organizational issues about needed mechanisms, which in the absence of informed knowledge, policies, and common understanding, can serve as barriers to achieving team scholarship goals. This university seminar addresses and builds a GW agenda of scholarly conversation around a few of these critical mechanisms: • Being a Team Scientist: Being Prepared, Knowing Your Resources, and Using Available Tools. • The-Science-of-Team-Science: Measuring Team Effectiveness • Collaborative Technologies and Informetrics • Educating Team and Interprofessional Scientists • Trust, Vision, Recognition and Scholarly Credit • Crossing Gender, Ethnic, and Cultural Boundaries in Science and Research This university seminar compiles, disseminates, and archives, through university events and products, key “think tank” outcomes, which will bring together thinkers and practitioners in these areas. Ultimately, this project will allow faculty and staff to contribute to developing activities and products that are delivered to the university community. To manage this undertaking, we explored the Open Science Framework (OSF) as a platform for engaging disparate and diverse stakeholders with different levels of engagement. By leveraging the OSF’s flexible structure and features, each think tank team can organize their OSF project to best suit their needs while also facilitating future public access to some or all of their work. This in turn will allow others to build on this work and thereby further develop scholarship in the field of collaborative science by making the process as well as the products public. Method. The presenters plan to provide an overview of the C3@GWU program and its three year strategic plan as an example of how to promote team science awareness and values, and its potential impact in a university setting. In addition, we will demonstrate how the technologies such as the Open Science Framework were introduced, incorporated, and served as infrastructure for the successful execution of the seminar’s multiple phases. SciTS Advancement. The C3@GWU university seminar provides a low cost, high impact model for expanding discourse, scholarship, and service in a university setting. Through sharing of the program and resources, we hope to encourage others to fashion similar programs as a means to increase awareness and scholarship in the area of team and collaborative science.