5
Possible Next Steps

Throughout the workshop, many participants summarized ideas about how various institutions could strengthen their infrastructure to better enable international collaborative research. As had been the purpose of the workshop, participants identified existing approaches, policies, and infrastructure elements that might overcome the impediments to successful international collaboration. In the workshop’s final session, the cochairs, Oscar Barbarin and Judith Torney-Purta, encouraged participants to identify specific changes they believed institutions could implement to create an environment conducive to international research collaborations and to convey the importance of improved infrastructure for international collaborative research to the professional groups and associations to which they belong. As a summary of a workshop, this report does not include formal recommendations. Approaches that merit further attention, as suggested by individual participants, are listed below.

• Universities could consider adopting international research and exchange of researchers, including participation at international meetings, as important institutional priorities. These priorities could be reflected at all levels of the institution.
• Universities could consider altering tenure and promotion guidelines to reflect the importance and challenges of international work and to include a more expansive and flexible view of the various methods used to disseminate results of international research.
• Universities could encourage their international offices to work closely with faculty to foster international collaborative research in addition to promoting student exchanges and study abroad.
• Universities could make efforts to educate faculty, deans, and other administrators about the value, process, and challenges of doing international research, including the need for explicit agreements to

• guide the collaborations. This could recognize the advantages of collaborators agreeing in advance on guidelines regarding authorship of the research products as well as the ownership and sharing of data.

• Institutions could implement more effective support systems for training social and behavioral scientists to engage in this type of research, including sensitivity to cultural differences.
• Universities could include a consideration of internationally appropriate research methods in relevant courses in the social and behavioral sciences or in educational research. These courses could also inform students about the availability of data sets collected internationally that are suitable for secondary analysis.
• Where feasible, institutions might modify their institutional review board approval processes to harmonize them with the realities of international collaborative research.
• Journals could modify authorship and publication policies to encourage rather than discourage international research collaborations.
• A range of organizations could hold workshops for journal editors, for university administrators and other stakeholders to inform them about the particular demands, characteristics, and requirements of international collaborative research.
• Funding agencies and institutional donors might be urged to do more to encourage international research, and especially to fund the additional time and effort needed to organize, carry out, and disseminate the results of collaborative international research projects.
• Universities and professional associations in psychology, education, and the social sciences could include international collaboration in their advocacy agendas.
• The National Research Council could integrate the behavioral and social sciences and education more fully into its activities, where appropriate, such as the sharing of data across national borders.
• U.S. government agencies could pursue agreements fostering international collaboration with more countries and international entities.

APPENDIXES

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