Why this conversation gets skipped
At the start, everyone is enthusiastic and nobody wants to raise awkward operational questions. Six months later those same questions are no longer awkward — they are disputes.
The conversation below takes about ninety minutes and prevents most of what goes wrong.
Questions about the work
- What does each of us think success looks like at the end of this project?
- Who does the design, who does the analysis, who writes? If the answer concentrates two of the three on one side, say so now.
- What is each side contributing that the other could not do alone?
- What happens if the results are not what we expect?
Questions about time
- How many hours per week can each of us realistically give this?
- What else is on your plate this year — teaching load, other projects, administrative roles?
- What periods are unavailable on your side? Academic calendar, national holidays, fieldwork seasons.
- How long does each internal approval step take on your side?
The second question matters more than it seems. Heavy teaching loads and administrative duties are common, and a partner who says yes to a timeline without you knowing their actual load is agreeing to something neither of you has assessed.
Questions about money
- Who is paying for what, and is the money confirmed or still an application?
- What documentation does each finance office require, and in what format?
- Are there cost categories that one side cannot fund?
- Who bears the currency and transfer costs?
Questions about outputs
- Which authorship criteria will we apply, and what does each position mean in our target journals?
- Provisionally, who is in which position for the outputs we expect?
- Who decides if we disagree?
- Does either side need a specific type of output for institutional assessment?
The last question is the one nobody asks and everybody has an answer to. A partner whose institution rewards a particular kind of publication has a real constraint, and knowing it early lets you plan outputs that serve both sides.
Questions about data and students
- Who collects the data, who holds it, who may use it for what and for how long?
- What ethics approvals are needed, from whom, and by when?
- Which institution registers any students involved, and who supervises?
- What happens to a student's work if the project ends early?
The question that surfaces the rest
After all of the above, ask: What would make this difficult on your side that I have not asked about?
Open-ended and permission-giving, it tends to produce the constraint that the structured questions missed. Ask it, then wait — the pause before the answer is often where the useful information is.
Write it down
One page: scope, roles, time, money, data, outputs, timeline. Both sides read it, both sides take it to their own research office to check feasibility, and both sides confirm in writing.
That one page is worth more than any amount of goodwill when something later goes wrong — not because anyone will enforce it, but because it gives you an agreed standard to discuss against rather than discussing against each other.
Note: regulations, funding schemes and institutional arrangements described here are set by the competent authorities and change over time. Verify against current official sources and ask the relevant institution before relying on any of this for a decision.
