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<b><h4>Briefly describe your collaboration and why it was felt that working in a collaboration would be more effective than working alone to resolve your research question.</h4></b>

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<b>Dr Peter West-Oram, Lecturer in Bioethics, Brighton and Sussex Medical School</b>

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I've been quite lucky to work with people from a variety of different backgrounds, mostly just one other person, or one or two other people in the same institution. And typically, that would be working across disciplines as well. And that was really helpful because you get sort of the alternative perspective. And so you can come at these things-- the issues that we're interested in from slightly different angles. And things that seem very obvious to someone working in one discipline are not quite so clear for someone else. So you can make sure that you've got the idea as clear as possible. 

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It's also advantageous because you sort of, on a practical level, you build in automatic breaks from working on a particular paper. So you have to stop looking at it while your colleague is looking at the paper, and then when you come back to it, you see it with fresh eyes. So it's helpful, both in terms of academic input, but also in terms of sort of practical working, because you have to step back from it sometimes and see how they're interpreting it. So you get that built in feedback, which is really helpful, I think.
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<b><h4>How was information or data collected, stored and shared?</h4></b>

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<b>Dr Peter West-Oram:</b> We shared data quite informally because I work in philosophy and theoretical bioethics, so there isn't qualitative or quantitative data to store. So what we were looking at is more just sharing versions of the document with each other via email or online storage systems. Possibly that was just unique to the collaborations that I've been involved in, but I think it's fairly straightforward when you're working on more theoretical work. And version control, rather than data storage, is the main issue because you have to make sure that you're both looking at the same draft of the paper when you’re saying, page 17 needs to be changed, or something like that.
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<b><h4>Did the collaboration pose any administrative challenges, such as differences in regulations or hiring and accounting practices? If yes, how did you deal with them?</h4></b>

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<b>Dr Peter West-Oram:</b> We were very lucky, with the collaborations. I've been quite lucky throughout my career, I think, in that my collaborators have typically been either in the same university, or sometimes in the same building. So, it's been very straightforward. It hasn't really been an issue in terms of hiring people or anything like that. So it's more a case of, if there were any complications, it was mostly making sure our schedules lined up. So, sometimes we'd be travelling for work, and it's oh no I can't look at it this week, because I'm here, but I'll get it to you that week. Or, this is the deadline, oh, can we change it? So it's fairly straightforward and quite easy, generally speaking. 