Online collaborative platforms connect geographically-dispersed researchers to enable them to cooperate seamlessly on their research, sharing research objects as well and ideas and experiences. Collaborative platforms are usually online services that provide a virtual environment to which multiple people can concurrently connect and work on the same task. These can range from extensive virtual research environments (VREs) which encompass a host of tools to facilitate sharing and collaboration, including web forums and wikis, collaborative document hosting, and discipline-specific tools such as data analysis or visualisation, right down to single specific tools which enable researchers to work together in real time on specific aspects of research (such as writing or analysis).
Research collaboration is growing exponentially and teams are becoming ever more interdisciplinary as researchers increasingly work in international and cross-disciplinary consortia to enable a multitude of perspectives on specific research questions. Fostering national and international collaborative research is also increasingly a funder priority.
Invest in Open provides the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs), a "step towards addressing the information asymmetries that exist in understanding and assessing open infrastructure projects. This effort is designed to model a means of standardizing information about core open infrastructure services for decision makers and members of the community."
Virtual research environments have been defined as "innovative, dynamic, and ubiquitous research supporting environments where scattered scientists can seamlessly access data, software, and processing resources managed by diverse systems in separate administration domains through their browser." (Candela, Castelli and Pagano, 2013)
An important collaborative platform in the context of Open Science is the Open Science Framework (OSF). Based on open source technologies and created by the not-for-profit Centre for Open Science, the OSF brands itself as "a scholarly commons to connect the entire research cycle". The OSF enables researchers to work on projects privately with a limited number of collaborators and make any part or the whole of their project public. It connects directly with many other collaborative systems like DropBox, GitHub and Google Docs, and can be used to store and archive research data, protocols and materials.
Learn more about the UFS institutional data repository, figshare, and collaborative possibilities on this platform.
Especially in the currently-predominant 'publish-or-perish' culture of research, writing is a core task in the life of researchers. Several online tools and platforms now enable researchers to work together on documents in real-time, and so avoid the versioning-hell of emailing Word documents back and forth. Platforms include Overleaf, ShareLaTex and Google Docs. Note that some of these tools are based on proprietary technology and some require payment for advanced features.
Take a look at the suggested writing tools on our Digital tools for researchers guide.
There are plenty of tools which enable groups to store and manage references, such as Zotero and Mendeley. These are shareable reference managers, with social network and article visualisation tools.
Read about online reference management on our Research support guide.
The power of the Web enables new modes of post-publication collaborative review through services like PubPeer and annotation tools like Hypothes.is and PaperHive.
Researchers have long made use of the Web for social networking - either via mainstream social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or dedicated academic social networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu.
Watch this video on how to enhance and manage your online academic presence from our YouTube channel.
Why should I add another layer of complexity to my collaboration process? Sharing the doc file is sufficient!
This is incorrect; although it may seem that you are introducing additional tools and platforms into your usual working approach they are actually resolving communication issues that you were probably not aware of in the first place. For example, using just a doc file (with or without track changes), only shows the higher level of information and usually only at the tail of the entire scientific process. Working in the context of a collaborative environment, from design to reporting, establishes both clear communication and adequate provenance.