Collaboration in Research: Why it Matters
Research visibility - making research available, searchable and easily discoverable online - is essential to attracting new and broader sources of funding to your lab, center, department or institution.
How Does Visible Research Attract More Funding?
Research visibility is a vital component of increasing partnerships and collaborations for you, your lab and your projects. When you showcase your current work openly, online, your work is more easily found by other researchers. This openness can open a gateway of collaboration opportunities.
How Does Visible Research Attract Attention?
While in the early process of researching, your current areas of investigation are not published. Consequently, your colleagues and peers are likely unaware of the research you are conducting. However, visibility changes that by allowing your research to act as ‘content marketing’ for you and your lab. By constantly updating and adding to your work online, you immediately boost your search engine optimization (SEO) and drive traffic to your site. This makes other researchers aware of your current work, which will increase opportunities for collaboration.
Additionally, it is important to tag keywords in your research. This improves search SEO and will ultimately increase findability, which can help you attract cross organization and cross disciplinary research partnerships.
Collaboration and Funding Opportunities
Collaborating and forming partnerships with other researchers can result in bigger grants and more funding to your research lab or institution. Research has shown that funding is more often allocated to a group of researchers, as opposed to an individual researcher. Researchers state that the reasoning for this is partially due to the likelihood of new ideas generated by multiple people, which result in accelerated outcomes. Furthermore, a study that investigated opportunities to increase research funding found that, “Getting well interconnected within tightly knit research communities enhances the funding chances as well.” By being connected to a research network, researchers are more likely to learn about possible future research and funding opportunities.
OpenScholar provides the infrastructure to support and encourage research visibility. Your research is a powerful asset that can attract talent, funding and partnerships.
Check out our lab lookbook to see how we can help you reach your goals.
When you use OpenScholar to show your work, share your work, and collaborate on research, magic happens: science advances, and outcomes are accelerated.