Planning and Agreement for Collaborative Teams (PACT): Introducing a Tool to Facilitate Research Collaboration

While modern behavioral research often involves collaboration, the specific form these collaborations take is rarely clear at a project’s outset. Researchers often enter collaborations with different expectations that remain ambiguous and opaque. Misaligned expectations create a significant potential for confusion, collaboration challenges, disappointment, and interpersonal conflict. Even well-intentioned and experienced researchers may find certain issues difficult to anticipate. Expectations and rules should be explicitly planned, specified and communicated among all collaborators to prevent such issues. However, existing planning tools are not sufficiently comprehensive to support collaboration planning for emerging research collaborations. To fill this gap, we introduce a tool for planning and agreement for collaborative teams (PACT). The aim for PACT is to guide initiators making key-decisions in research collaboration, and formalizes a plan for the collaboration process. The PACT checklist asks initiators to make decisions about aspects such as project organization, authorship, research approach, collaboration process, open science principles, manuscript writing process, and the publication plan. The choices are then presented to potential collaborators to align expectations, facilitate decision making, and prevent future conflicts. The current paper describes the reasoning behind and development of PACT, describes the different domains it covers development and various aspects of a tool, planning and agreement for collaborative teams (PACT), and provides a tutorial for its use. We conclude with an outlook on the increasing importance of providing structure to research collaboration to ensure that science is equitable, reliable and effective.