R2X Collaboration Plans at the Physical Sciences Laboratory

Collaboration plans have been suggested as a way of documenting how research and operational entities might document their work together on common goals at the point when formal transition plans may not yet be required. At this point, the work may be more exploratory towards those goals, and specifics for a full transition plan may not yet be known.This presentation will discuss how the NOAA Physical Sciences Lab is creating and using collaboration plans to formalize and structure collaborations that had often been documented in other ways. These include plan with other line offices of NOAA as well as external collaborators, and may be produced for an individual project or overarching for multiple related projects.

These plans include sections such as the title and overall goal and aims of the collaboration, a description of how it targets NOAA missions, and the history of past collaboration if any.(this is similar to “results of prior” in some proposals). The project or projects are described including a description of mechanisms for the collaboration. Finally, the overall benefits and outcomes of the set of projects are described; for a multi-project plan, this is the overarching outcomes of several projects. PSL has developed templates for these plans for both multi-project activities and single projects.

This presentation will describe templates we have created and give examples of PSL collaboration plans and our experiences developing them as a way of formalizing and structuring collaborations and ultimately, paving the way for transitioning research into operations and applications.