“A bit hard for us to explain”: Barriers to creating new information in scientific collaboration

Scientific collaboration is a distinct iteration of information creation as a process. It aims to form willful relationships between scientists to achieve the shared objective of new information creation with the end goal of knowledge production. Findings of an exploratory study investigating barriers that hinder effective scientific collaboration and strategies to cope with these obstacles are reported. A qualitative and interpretive methodology is leveraged to analyze data collected from 14 in-depth interviews with researchers who work in a cross-disciplinary scientific research center. The results indicate that domain disparity and motivation and engagement are the strongest hindrances to effective collaboration. Researchers adopt active and constant learning as an approach to mitigate barriers, lower affective distress, and improve collaboration processes. Malleable boundary objects can facilitate collaboration by adjusting to research aims but may also contort projects, manifesting as a barrier to new information creation.