TY - JOUR
T1 - Ideas and perspectives
T2 - Proposed best practices for collaboration at cross-disciplinary observatories
AU - Philip Kaye, Jason
AU - Brantley, Susan L.
AU - Zan Williams, Jennifer
N1 - Funding Information:
In 2007, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) began funding a network of CZOs (Brantley et al., 2017), and one of these initial CZOs was the Susquehanna Shale Hills critical zone observatory (SSH CZO), where we work. After collaborating for about a decade and discussing ideas in several all-team meetings, we distilled lessons learned from our successes and mistakes into the best practices guide presented below. Ours is not a definitive model but rather a single and evolving example that is meant to foster discussion of how to maximize the benefits of interdisciplinary science. While Sect. 2.1 (co-authorship) has been addressed in some prior publications (Weltzin et al., 2006; Oliver et al., 2018), the major new contributions of this document are the treatment of other aspects of interdisciplinary environmental science, including managing infrastructure, advising students, and sharing model codes and data. Our format is to first lay out the core concepts for key themes (Sect. 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, etc.) and then use a litany of questions and answers to flesh out details for important cases that arise over time. We implement this document by asking CZO scientists to discuss it and sign it in periodic team sessions.
Funding Information:
Financial support. This research has been supported by the US
Funding Information:
National Science Foundation (grant nos. EAR-0725019, EAR-1239285 and EAR-1331726).
Funding Information:
When a PI receives new funding for new instrumentation (separate from the CZO grant), the CZO itself will not become responsible for the new infrastructure that is emplaced in the CZO catchments. Likewise, the new PI will be encouraged to use the CZO’s data infrastructure for publication of data; however, the CZO will not become responsible for the data from the new project nor will the CZO police publication of the new data. Ultimately, however, it is recognized that the PI is generally co-locating the experiment at a CZO catchment due to the preexisting research and infrastructure. Given this “value added” by the CZO, the CZO steering committee and field operations specialist can ultimately decide whether certain activities are pursued in the CZO catchments. For example, a proposal might be funded to geophysically monitor Shale Hills that results in a new permitting fee. After initiation of the work, the PI of the new proposal might decide he or she wants to perform trenching up the middle of the catchment. If the CZO steering committee decides this is inappropriate, then the new PI will not be enabled to trench. In this regard, the steering committee will work closely with the landowner to maintain appropriate activity.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Now Publishers Inc. All rights reserved.
PY - 2019/12/9
Y1 - 2019/12/9
N2 - Interdisciplinary science affords new opportunities but also presents new challenges for biogeosciences collaboration. Since 2007, we have conducted site-based interdisciplinary research in central PA, USA, at the Susquehanna Shale Hills critical zone observatory. Early in our collaboration, we realized the need for some best practices that could guide our project team. While we found some guidelines for determining authorship on papers, we found fewer guidelines describing how to collaboratively establish field sites, share instrumentation, share model code, and share data. Thus, we worked as a team to develop a best practices document that is presented here. While this work is based on one large team project, we think many of the themes are universal, and we present our example to provide a building block for improving the function of interdisciplinary biogeoscience science teams.
AB - Interdisciplinary science affords new opportunities but also presents new challenges for biogeosciences collaboration. Since 2007, we have conducted site-based interdisciplinary research in central PA, USA, at the Susquehanna Shale Hills critical zone observatory. Early in our collaboration, we realized the need for some best practices that could guide our project team. While we found some guidelines for determining authorship on papers, we found fewer guidelines describing how to collaboratively establish field sites, share instrumentation, share model code, and share data. Thus, we worked as a team to develop a best practices document that is presented here. While this work is based on one large team project, we think many of the themes are universal, and we present our example to provide a building block for improving the function of interdisciplinary biogeoscience science teams.
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U2 - 10.5194/bg-16-4661-2019
DO - 10.5194/bg-16-4661-2019
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85076494394
SN - 1726-4170
VL - 16
SP - 4661
EP - 4669
JO - Biogeosciences
JF - Biogeosciences
IS - 23
ER -