Research Management in "Many Analysts" Projects

Lessons From the Many Speech Analysis Project

Abstract

With the recent increase of large scientific collaborations in the form of "Many Analysts" projects, research project management has quickly moved from small/medium-scale coordination to large-scale planning. Project coordinators are faced with unprecedented challenges which make "Many Analysts" projects  time consuming and resource demanding. With this poster, we would like to share our experience managing the ongoing Many Speech Analysis project (https://many-speech-analyses.github.io) and offer tips and logistic solutions to minimise the resource overhead required for such type of projects. We will also discuss which steps in the process didn't go as expected and how on hindsight we wished we approached them.

More specifically we will discuss the following aspects:

• Overall design of the study in five phases: recruitment, teams' analyses, analyses peer-review, meta-analysis and write-up.
• Preparation of a Registered Report and process of getting an In Principle Acceptance prior to the beginning of the first phase (recruitment).
• Preparation and management of a project-wide OSF repository using the R package osfr, and integration with GitHub.
• Logistics of recruitment and team creation with social media, Eventbrite and Google Sheets.
• Development of questionnaires to gather background information on the recruited analysts and to collect reports on the the teams' analyses.
• General project management with GitHub projects, issues and GitHub actions.