Over the last decade, individuals in the social and behavioural sciences have increasingly begun to adopt grass-roots versions of practices long common in the physical and medical sciences, those in which research is designed, performed, analyzed, and interpreted by large-scale collaborative teams spanning multiple continents, participant populations, and theoretical and empirical perspectives. Big Team Social Science (BTSS) endeavours have embraced Open Science values and practices, and are motivated by desires to make Big Team Social Science research more reliable, more valid, and more representative.

Despite their potential benefits, large-scale collaborative efforts are inherently complex, with new challenges constantly emerging (Baumgartner et al., 2023). In particular, though there are many clear potential advantages to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in conducting behavioural science in large, international, and horizontally organized teams, there are also numerous difficulties in BTSS actually meeting this potential. The current talk will, first, introduce the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)-funded research partnership: CONNECT (Coordinated Network of Networks for Enhancing Collaborative Teams), which seeks to identify and address the persistent challenges in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion within large-scale collaborative research by uniting seven BTSS networks comprising more than 3,500 researchers from over 70 countries with aligned community partners. Over seven years, this Canadian-led initiative will study current EDI practice in BTSS, develop tools and workflows to improve it, and then iteratively implement and improve those tools and workflows via ongoing partner BTSS projects. In addition, we will briefly report on findings from a series of “hub events” put on by community partner Advancing Big Team Reproducible science through Increased Representation (ABRIR) in several low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) in the majority world in 2022. Through these events, major barriers to researchers from low and middle income countries’ participation in BTSS were identified, including but not limited to nervousness about lack of skills or experience leading to criticisms or scrutiny; accessibility barriers like language, cultural/communication styles; and ‘hidden curricula’ in which commitment requirements, onboarding requirements, and cultural norms are unclear. These barriers are problematic for both ethical and strategic reasons, in that they risk recreating neocolonial dynamics and ignoring psychological phenomena outside the North American/European experience (see, e.g., Adetula et al., 2022).

This talk thus speaks directly to the InSciTS community's interest in advancing teams through the science of team science, with particular interest in promoting EDI in all aspects of Big Team Social Science.