Working on Collaborative Platforms

Working collaboratively is a core component of open research.  It leverages strengths through sharing knowledge and experiences across the research life cycle;  gains insights from including and valuing a more diverse range of people and practices and sparks innovation with the combination of skills and knowledge.  To facilitate collaborative working, digital tools and platforms have emerged to connect both researchers and researchers with other knowledge sources.

Platforms for co-creating the research process directly with the public

Online computing and research tools allow the researcher to provide direct public access to the research process. Websites, wikis and blogs, online research environments, and citizen science platforms can all be used variously to document and publish the primary processes and materials of research, and enable direct participation in research activities by wider groups of users.  Many of these tools create the possibility of a new kind of research, which extends beyond the closed group to a wider public, and enables the research process to be co-creative, massively collaborative, and to evolve in response to critical feedback.

Platforms connecting researchers

Online collaborative platforms also connect geographically-dispersed researchers to enable them to cooperate on their research, sharing research objects as well and ideas and experiences. These can range from extensive virtual research environments (VREs) which encompass a host of tools to facilitate sharing and collaboration (e.g. Open Science Framework, ELIXIR), 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).