Abstract
BackgroundCross-institutional cross-disciplinary collaboration has become a trend as researchers move toward building more productive and innovative teams for scientific research. Research collaboration is significantly changing the organizational structure and strategies used in the clinical and translational science domain. However, due to the obstacles of diverse administrative structures, differences in area of expertise, and communication barriers, establishing and managing a cross-institutional research project is still a challenging task. We address these challenges by creating an integrated informatics platform to reduce the barriers to biomedical research collaboration.ResultsThe Request Management System (RMS) is an informatics infrastructure designed to transform a patchwork of expertise and resources into an integrated support network. The RMS facilitates investigators’ initiation of new collaborative projects and supports the management of the collaboration process. In RMS, experts and their knowledge areas are categorized and managed structurally to provide consistent service. A role-based collaborative workflow is tightly integrated with domain experts and services to streamline and monitor the life-cycle of a research project. The RMS has so far tracked over 1,500 investigators with over 4,800 tasks. The research network based on the data collected in RMS illustrated that the investigators’ collaborative projects increased close to 3 times from 2009 to 2012. Our experience with RMS indicates that the platform reduces barriers for cross-institutional collaboration of biomedical research projects.ConclusionBuilding a new generation of infrastructure to enhance cross-disciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration has become an important yet challenging task. In this paper, we share the experience of developing and utilizing a collaborative project management system. The results of this study demonstrate that a web-based integrated informatics platform can facilitate and increase research interactions among investigators.
Highlights
Cross-institutional cross-disciplinary collaboration has become a trend as researchers move toward building more productive and innovative teams for scientific research
This result shows that Request Management System (RMS) has already attracted a considerably large group of users from different external to the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative (CTSC)
RMS is a novel system for integrating expertise and resources to support multidisciplinary and crossinstitutional collaboration
Summary
Cross-institutional cross-disciplinary collaboration has become a trend as researchers move toward building more productive and innovative teams for scientific research. Due to the obstacles of diverse administrative structures, differences in area of expertise, and communication barriers, establishing and managing a cross-institutional research project is still a challenging task. We address these challenges by creating an integrated informatics platform to reduce the barriers to biomedical research collaboration. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap [13] established new aims to improve Biomedical Research, in which the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) [14] program is the most important feature. The goal of the RCS is to assist investigators navigating the cross-disciplinary research process and to provide consultation support at each phase of clinical and translational research. Like many multiinstitutional organizations, the CTSC has a complex fivepartner structure and so faces challenges with respect to coordinating the experts and resources located at different sites for collaborative research
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