My Default Collaboration Principles

I will discuss this piece with any potential collaborator to understand which of these does not apply to that specific collaboration before starting.

• Leader
  1. Whoever initiates and thus leads the project is the first author;
• Authors
  1. The criteria for being an author:
     1. Make at least as much intellectual contribution as the fixed last author (the supervisor);
     2. Approve the publication and agree to be held accountable for all aspects of the work; an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work
     3. This is not automatic. You shouldn't "claim coauthorship" under any circumstances; you should propose coauthorship and that proposal should be accompanied by specific proposed contributions
  2. Otherwise, given written permission to be acknowledged, the contribution of non-author contributors will only be mentioned in the acknowledgment session of the paper;
  3. The criteria are not intended for use as a means to disqualify people from authorship who otherwise meet authorship criteria by denying them the opportunity to meet criteria;
• Authorship order
  1. Among the three components of a project: theoretical framework, experiment&analysis, and paper/poster/website/slide writing, whoever contributes the most is/are the main contributor(s) of that component; all main contributors for any component are authors of equal contribution to the first author.
  2. Other authors are sorted based on their contributions.
• Task
  1. Collaborators have the right to refuse to be assigned to a task;
  2. The leader needs to do everything that all other collaborators don’t want to do (because if the work wins praise, the praise will mostly go to the leader);
  3. An assigned task that has no reasonable progress and is causing the pause or delay of the whole project is subject to be reassigned to another author;
• There'll be a section in appendix summarizing every author's contribution for the paper. Everyone can write a draft sentence for themselves if they want.
• The principle to handle unexpected circumstances is that everyone involved in the project should have an open conversation. After such a conversation, the leader has the right to make the final decision.

My Understanding of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

• People in different fields have different methodologies, paradigms, and therefore, intuition when approaching a research question. This might lead to some communication issues and the best remedy is to make sure everyone is aware of and acknowledge this difference.
  • E.g. (ML for theorem proving) ML people mostly care about how powerful the method/architecture is, while formal method people mostly care about how to make formalization easier.
• People in different fields may want something different when being involved in the same research project. This is a more fundamental issue because it affects the framing of the project. The collaboration is established because both want the knowledge of each other, but the framing affects how they interpret the result. My current solution is to balance all sorts of takeaways for their diverse benefit.
  • E.g. (ML for theorem proving) Given a good method, ML ppl mostly want to tell a story of what insight this method gives, while formal method ppl mostly want to have a handy tool with low study cost and awesome automation.
  • E.g. (AI vs. Computational modeling) AI ppl want to solve a problem in the best possible manner while modeling ppl want to account for aspects of natural intelligence

Reference

1. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html