Launching the Navigating Team Science professional development workshop at #SfN19 is @anne_churchland talking about the @IntlBrainLab. Their goal is to develop a brain-wide model of decision making with 21 PIs. 👇
The team is international and all labs have at least one postdoc/student on the project. Each one leads a subproject so that they can have first author publications. There are multiple staff scientists and project manager to coordinate data and work.
There are external staff scientists that assist with the more complex aspects of data sharing and this is important because this expertise may not be present in individual lab. #teamscience
The @IntlBrainLab governance is a sociocracy where there is no individual in charge and decisions are based on consent. There's an executive board and working groups that meet weekly to standardize procedures in each lab. #TeamScience
The choice of the decision making behavior to study was the first test of governance. Everyone had to settle on one behavioral task that was sufficiently complex but tractable and everyone received a kit to set up the same apparatus in every lab. #TeamScience
The instrumentation is the same at all sites and there's a technical specialist who travels to all sites to ensure standardization #TeamScience
This ensured replicability so that every site can obtain the exact same behavioral result. Variables as bedding or food are difficult to standardize across countries. Machine learning was used to test all variables to see if the data is similar across sites #TeamScience
The next step was to define where and how to record for brain-wide activity and what to do with the data...300TB a year!! Data needs to be accessible to all investigators and open to other scientists. A navigator site had to be developed for access. #TeamScience
Chellenges of #TeamScience are that there is less flexibility, that there is a lot of effort put into managing the collaborations and that there is less room for single first author papers the field values.
Positives of #TeamScience are the collaboration, ability to have multiple mentors and to tackle questions that can not be done by a single lab.
