Lessons Learned in Collaborative Research: a ReXPO Workshop
As part of the Digital Practice Workshop Series co-sponsored by the Centers for Digital Scholarship and the Humanities Center, we were delighted to host Andrew Henson and Peter Fan for their event “Lessons Learned in Collaborative Research: a ReXPO Workshop.” Taking place on Tuesday, October 21, 2025 in our Critical Making Lab, the event highlighted Andrew and Peter’s main takeaways from their Sloane-funded research on strategies on Collaborative Research Services.
They began by providing some background on the collaborative research onboarding service, which launched in 2023. As Northeastern’s global campus expands and research teams spread geographically, gaps have started to emerge within research groups. Andrew and Peter were tasked with identifying these gaps and determining how best to fill them. To identify best practices for collaboration, they sought to identify successes, failures, gaps, and standard collaborative practices amongst research groups at Northeastern.
By embedding their service within the Associate Deans of Research, Andrew and Peter were able to identify research teams that were starting up or were in need of their service. They interviewed a variety of collaborative research teams at Northeastern, including The Global Resilience Institute, Boston Area Research Initiative, and Lazer Lab. One of their takeaways was that research groups tend to have a very small window to start up, and will improvise a solution if the resource needed is not available or apparent. They described how limitations on time and expertise may constrain how much effort teams are willing to invest in the startup process: teams may give up on a resource or platform when they cannot immediately figure out how it works.
Andrew was focused on assessing the communication across research teams, while Peter focused on data management. Andrew highlighted how the particular communication platform, whether it be Teams, Slack, email, or phone, did not matter for success as much as the communication preference of the specific team. He found that the most important factor for communication success was consistency—it is essential for teams to predominantly use one communication platform to prevent things slipping through the cracks. The more communication platforms in use, the more materials that can be missed.
Peter then turned to discuss his findings on data and data management. Much like communication, the specific data storage platform mattered less than consistent usage by teams. Through interviews, Peter found that version control was an issue for many of the teams surveyed. To remedy this, Peter arranged a training that sought to establish best practices for version control. Andrew and Peter shared that they would recommend SharePoint to any research teams currently starting up, because it is already embedded into university architecture and has better privacy policies than leading alternatives like Google.
The workshop featured a robust question and answer session. Andrew emphasized the need for significant training for team members, especially on questions of security. They also found that having a team member who was already embedded in Northeastern’s ecosystem was a marker of success. If you are interested in learning more about the digital scholarship happenings at Northeastern, the CDS hosts regular events which can be found on the CDS Events page.