The Global Risks Forum (GRF)
Much risk research is now done by consortia: universities, public agencies, international organisations and private partners working under one agreement. How those collaborations are governed decides who sets the questions, who controls the data, who is named as author and who carries responsibility when something goes wrong. This page sets out how research communities form and fail, how their governance can be observed, and which institutions hold the decisions.
GRF · Established · service level R0
Collaborative research governance is the set of agreements and rules that decide how a research consortium works: who sets the questions, who controls and shares the data, who is credited and who answers when something goes wrong. Most terms are fixed early, in consortium and data-sharing agreements, and imbalances between partners tend to last for the life of the project.
For collaborative research, in GRF's situational-awareness reading, the map opens on population density, night lights and flood water, framed on Europe; 3 further NASA layers wait in the list.
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NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Blue Marble (NASA) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Natural Earth
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For collaborative research, in GRF's situational-awareness reading, the map opens on population density, night lights and flood water, framed on Europe; 3 further NASA layers wait in the list.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
Layers and dates
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Collaborative research · Science-policy panel · Synthesis SY-95
| Reduced losses | 5 | Moderate | Benefit |
| Faster recovery | 4 | Low | Unclear |
| Equity of access | 3 | Very low | Unclear |
Institutional research communities. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
Consortium and data-sharing agreements fix ownership, publication rights and decision rules early. Partners with legal capacity and control of funding shape the terms, and imbalances persist for the life of the project.
Authorship and contribution rules vary by field. Without agreed criteria, junior researchers, data collectors and partners in lower-income settings are under-credited, which weakens the next collaboration.
Data collected under one agreement are often unusable by others because consent, licences or formats do not permit reuse. The community repeats collection instead of building on what exists.
Networks built around a grant lose staff, infrastructure and memory when the grant ends. Knowledge held in people rather than records disappears, and the next collaboration starts again.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Consortium agreement | A contract among the partners of a research project that sets governance, decision rules, ownership of results, publication rights and liability. |
| Data-sharing agreement | A contract that sets the terms on which data may be transferred, accessed and reused, including consent, security and publication conditions. |
| Contributor role statement | A structured record of each person's part in a research output, often using the CRediT taxonomy of fourteen roles maintained by NISO. |
| Equitable partnership | A collaboration in which partners share decisions on questions, budgets, data and credit fairly, a concern most often raised for partners in lower-income settings. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-institution awards by funder | count of awards | annual | Funder award records | OFFICIAL |
| Outputs with contributor role statements | percent of outputs | annual | Publication metadata | OBSERVED |
| Datasets deposited with persistent identifiers | count per project | per project | Repository and DOI records | OBSERVED |
| Lead institution location by income group | share of awards by World Bank income group | annual | Funder award records | OFFICIAL |
| Consortia with published data-sharing terms | percent of projects | per project | Project disclosures | DECLARED |
| Networks active after funding ends | share of networks | periodic | Follow-up surveys | REPORTED |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| CORDIS (European Commission) | Partners, roles and outputs of EU-funded collaborative projects | Free reuse, attribution |
| NIH RePORTER and NSF award search | Awards, collaborating institutions and linked publications | Public domain |
| OpenAlex | Co-authorship and institutional affiliation networks | Open, CC0 |
| DataCite metadata | Persistent identifiers and metadata for deposited datasets | Open, CC0 |
| ORCID public data file | Researcher identifiers linked to works and affiliations | Open, CC0 |
| CRediT contributor roles taxonomy (NISO) | Standard contributor roles used in publication metadata | Open standard |
Research Nexus prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Research funders and councils | Which governance, data and authorship terms to require of funded consortia | Comparative agreement terms; evidence on partnership equity and data reuse |
| University research and legal offices | Which consortium and data-sharing terms to accept | Model agreements and their known problems; dialogue records from partners |
| Intergovernmental and international research programmes | How to structure lead and partner roles across countries | Patterns of lead institution location and credit; records of partner experience |
| Data repositories and infrastructure bodies | Which metadata and access terms to require at deposit | FAIR practice; reuse barriers recorded in dialogue |
Studies of research collaboration identify a few recurring conditions for success: shared goals that partners helped define, clear agreements on data, authorship and intellectual property, sustained coordination capacity, and trust built through repeated interaction. Collaborations that are designed by one partner and staffed by others tend to produce less and dissolve when funding ends.
Equity is a persistent issue. In many international collaborations, researchers from lower-income countries have been treated as data collectors rather than co-investigators, with limited authorship and little lasting capacity. Fair partnership practice addresses this through shared leadership, budget control and capacity investment.
Good practice is increasingly documented, but much of it is learned by doing. Comparing how different collaborations handled the same problems, such as a partner leaving or a dispute over data, is a core use of dialogue.
Written terms for governance, data, authorship and intellectual property. Limits: take time to negotiate and cannot anticipate everything.
Principles for equitable international research partnerships. Limits: voluntary and unevenly applied.
Studying co-authorship and partnership patterns. Limits: publications capture only part of collaboration.
Assessing what collaborations achieve, using causal inference and impact evaluation. Limits: long-term effects are hard to attribute.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.