Do You Want to Be a Collaborative and Connected Researcher?

R&D services productivity is what makes the difference between one lab and another. In order to optimize their productivity and teamwork, research groups are turning towards collaborative solutions more and more. If you are not already collaborative-online-tool friendly, here is a review of the collaborative tools you could benefit from for your R&D activities.

It is now possible to process, modify and share information in real time thanks to those online tools and SaaS solutions open to all members of a team or even at the organizational level. And the collaborative cloud now attracts many companies or academics who opt for collaborative solutions hosted in SaaS or on-premise model. We offer to see SaaS solutions and online tools in details in this article.

Share your protocols to get feedback on your experiments

First thing for your routine as a researcher is experimentation. It means creating or using pre-existent protocols to experiment with.

Creating new protocols and sharing them online is a great way to sharpen your experimental knowledge. Also, it is an even greater way to contribute to the scientific community as a whole and to provide instructors and teachers with guidance and evaluation tools.

And, for productivity sharing protocols it is pure gold because it means obtaining feedback on your protocol and optimizing it for future use.

Now, let’s see what tool you could use to share your protocols to the community easily.

Benchfly

Made in USA • Price on demand

Welcome to the future of science, filmed protocols.

Benchly hosts and/or produces scientific protocol videos. In between, they also offer to create a full video for your protocols with the bits of video you filmed yourself in your lab. They put their expertise in video production at your disposal.

Your protocols can be private only for you and your team to see, or they can be in open access on the Benchfly website.

And apart from the obvious brandable role of those videos, you can cite your videos in papers, resumes, and grants using each video’s DOI number (Digital Object Identifier), because Benchfly is a publisher.

Of course, you can easily share classical protocols. Why not use the protocol exchange from Nature Protocols’ journal.

Protocol Exchange

Made in UK • Free

Protocol Exchange is an open resource. It is filled with protocols by the scientific community who pools their experimental know-how to help accelerate research.

You have the possibility to browse a protocol among more than 3200 available protocols.

And if you create your account you can share your own protocols to the public and also comment on existing protocols and organize your favorites.

An interesting feature is the “lab groups” which you can join and which include the people working in the labs. Each group lists all the protocols it put online. Which makes protocols pretty easy to track down.

Be a team player with your experimental data and get access to your colleague’s data

Let’s say you have well managed your experiment with your protocol sharing tool. Now you have a data set to analyze.

Concerted efforts in understanding your experimental data are often your saving grace. Indeed, while it is sometimes difficult to unravel and pinpoint what is important in a data set on your own, sharing and gathering with other minds might be helpful.

Let’s see which tool can enable you to do it.

Addgene

Made in USA • Free

Addgene is a nonprofit organization that helps scientists share plasmids structure. They are from the United States but they have customer support in the UK.

It is a plasmid repository for the research community. Addgene is a high-quality library of published structure of plasmids for use in research and discovery.

Moreover, what is very handy is that you can always find data related to the materials they request because plasmids are linked with article references.

You can deposit your plasmid information and also browse within their collection of over 50 000 plasmids. The browser is organized to help you to easily find what you are looking for. Indeed, you can browse by expression system or species of genes for example.

Apart from materials, there are many types of data that you can also share. Another example, for academic labs, is Figshare.

Figshare

Made in UK • Free

Figshare is a tool that helps academic institutions store, share and manage their research outputs.

Basically, you can upload files up to 5GB of any format. If you want to upload your articles figures or a video of your protocol, that is the perfect tool.

You can access your items easily, sort them privately as you wish with tags and other details.

Then you have the possibility to share them with colleagues and control access to your private data. But you can also choose to publish it and make it publicly available and citable with a DOI.

Support discussion and innovation by writing your articles collaboratively

Now that you produced data during your experimentation and shared it, the best advice you could get is to be open to different thoughts, different voices, and unexpected conclusions. In a nutshell, to get published.

Whether you collaborate with your team or other researchers in your field, it is always useful to share information, especially when writing your scientific articles.

Let’s see an example of a tool to ease collaborating on a publication.

Arpha writing tool

Made in Bulgaria • Price on demand

ARPHA stands for: Authoring, Reviewing, Publishing, Hosting, and Archiving, all in one place.

It is an online authoring collaborative tool. Not only does it enable you to work with co-authors and peers while writing a manuscript online but it also supports pre-submission external reviews.

And Arpha also provides a variety of publishing templates with options for branding, production and revenue models.

It includes online revisions, editing, and also an online import of references and data for you to share with your team.

Arpha is described as the first end-to-end journal publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript. Indeed, its features go from authoring through submission, peer review, publication to dissemination.

If you are interested in knowing more about publishing and writing collaborative tools we have written an articleon this particular subject.

Remember to complement your writing tool with a reference manager collaborative tool

Knowing which collaborative writing tool you are going to use is good. But, what makes it great is to couple it with a reference manager collaborative tool. Because publications come hopefully with citations.

Let’s now see which tool you can use to manage your references with the team.

Mendeley

Made in the Netherlands • Free

Mendeley is a tool with multiple possibilities. First of all, it is a reference manager that helps you organize and search your personal library, annotate documents and cite as you write.

While writing your publications you can easily use this tool to generate citations and bibliographies in a whole range of journal styles. Mendeley’s Citation Plugin is fully compatible with Word (including Word for Mac) and LibreOffice which is quite convenient. And, the cherry on top, it supports BibTeX export for use with LaTeX.

It is a very useful writing tool. But what is even more interesting is that Mendeley keeps you connected with researchers worldwide, thus facilitating collaboration across the globe and in every field of research. Indeed, they put at your disposal a network of 6 million users to interact with.

You have to create your research profile and include a curated list of your publications and affiliations. And there you go, you can create or join public groups to share knowledge and discuss new research with others.

And if you only want your team to access the discussion you can also create private groups that are only visible to invited members. This is very useful for sharing information securely.

Tools for calendar sharing, task management, laboratory information management ( LIMS) and data management ( SDMS) offer more and more advanced features and user-friendly interfaces for mobile situations. Those tools are here to ease your R&D journey. Indeed, online tools and SaaS solutions allow interoperability of management and operational systems.

To conclude, as you could see in this article, your journey as a researcher is not a lonely one. Collaboration is at every corner and it is for the best because it enhances productivity by stimulating discussion and change.

If you are looking for partners to continue your scientific journey, you can find them on Scientist.