What are your collaboration dealbreakers?

What kinds of risks are you willing to make?

We collaborate to expand the range of what is possible. We can ask bigger questions, apply a broader range of techniques, and tap into a greater pool of creativity and energy. I love collaborating because doing science with others outside my own lab is fun and the relationships themselves are personally rewarding, but the drive to collaborate comes from tapping into things that other people have that you don’t, and providing other researchers with things that you have that they don’t. Like how peanut butter and chocolate go together.

I also like collaborations because they can disrupt the linear power dynamics that prevail in academic science, which are responsible for so many harmful outcomes.

And if you’re working on projects that by design are working to address real-world problems experienced by people, then of course you’re working with those people, and social scientists, educators, and such.

Collaboration is an essential spice in scientific research.

But we can’t descend willy-nilly into every collaboration because this way can lie danger (as well as overcommitment). Collaboration makes you vulnerable, and if there’s any lesson that junior scientists need to learn, it’s that the successful management of vulnerability is key to progressing your career. If you’re too vulnerable, folks will take advantage of you. If you don’t open yourself up, then the world flies past you as you remain inert. Which means that deciding who you will collaborate with is a huge deal. And when you’re a junior scientist in a more vulnerable position, it’s even a huger deal, and it’s also when you might have less power over such decisions.

What should be our dealbreakers when finding collaborators? What lines should we not cross, or under what conditions should we be willing to cross such lines?

For quite a long while, I’ve been clear about having a “no assholes” rule. This easy to implement when you’re dealing with people who are transparent about being assholes. (Like Stuart Pimm, for example). Once there was a really exciting project that I was invited to join, but the senior author was this guy, so I decided against getting involved (and wasn’t on the resulting Nature paper). It is what it is, and I’d rather not have worked with him than have had a Nature paper. I know some folks who fully knew who he was and took the faustian bargain of working with him. And unfortunately, the open secret of his toxicity wasn’t open enough and too many people ended up becoming survivors instead of mere collaborators.

Assholes generally don’t advertise the unsavory parts of their constitution, and some people are very good about self-deception as well. This means that a no-asshole rule can’t protect you from assholes, because it’s quite easy to fail to diagnose this in advance. Even though I’ve become a lot more savvy as a judge of character (mostly though trial and error), it’s not enough to rely on your Spidey Sense. It pays to do some due diligence.

What does it look like to look into the background of a potential collaborators? I think there are two approaches to take. The first is to ask around. If a person you’re thinking about working with uncomfortable with you asking around about their prior collaborations and trainees, that what they call a red flag. Short of that, without doing informal reference checks there are still lots of things to look out for.

One thing it took me a long time to realize, when trying to understand someone’s character, that you’ve got to go beyond looking for red flags. Because people are often really good about having those red flags buried or creating exculpatory narratives that people around them buy into. Instead, you’ve got to identify multiple green flags. In this case, what are green flags that you might notice? Someone who pops up in all author positions on a regular basis, and are clearly fine contributing to projects in which they’re a middle author once in a while. When they continue to collaborate with their former doctoral students. When you see them publishing in journals of various levels of prestigousness (Why is this a green flag? Because a coauthor who exclusively will ants publish in the Biggest and Best journals will be a headache, a pain, and a mess, and also a bad person for your trainees to work with.) Green flags show that they’re collaborating with other PIs with with different identities working at different kinds of institutions. Another green flag is a willingness to be clear about roles, responsibilities, and authorship from the get go.

Here are some firm lines that I’ve drawn:

If someone is writing a grant and they have control over the budgetary piece that is my responsibility, then I should run away. It can be made into a subcontract or a subaward or a consulting agreement or something. (For example, it has been far FAR too common that folks from UCLA and USC have called up people in my department and wanted to “collaborate” but really it was about putting our minority-serving institution on the grant in order to get funded, but will any resources flow the way of us? Heh, maybe that won’t be a problem henceforth in these United States.)

Another firm line is if it involves me providing support and training to someone else’s students but they’re not willing to reciprocate. I’ve had a lot of collaborations that are just me doing my thing on the side, students just not involved, and that’s fine with me. But if I’m doing the training of other students in more well-resourced institutions (because trust me, every other university is better resourced than mine), then how about you invest in our folks too?

How you do choose to collaborate, and how do you protect the more vulnerable people you work with who might end up not getting the support, credit, or resources that they need to thrive?