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In this blog post, we will discuss how to create and use effective calendars for complex research collaborations, as well as other academinc networks. Having calendars for research projects is very useful to provide all involved scientists with a good overview of upcoming events. However, conventional calendars are not very useful for complex network projects, because not all events are relevant for all involved project members. Here, we will discuss how the calendars you can find on foldercase can resolve this issue.

As a basis for creating research project calendars, it is important to remember that in foldercase, you can organize your research within your own team as team projects. Besides this, you can also organize them as research network projects, which are specifically designed for collaborative work that involves multiple research groups. On foldercase, network projects can be connected to each other, such that complex collaborations and academic networks can be represented in a transparent manner.

Calendars can be created for each of your teams, as well as separately for each network project. By organizing your research group's work into multiple teams of individuals working closely together, you can thus create calendars that capture important events specifically for each team. Note that you can export these calendars as files or URL, in order to import or synchronize them with your favourite calendar application. However, you can also create calendars for far more complex, colalborative networks, which we will explain below.

How to create calendars for research collaborations and academic networks?

In typical research collaborations and academic networks, there will be events that are relevant for all involved members. These are usually communicated by the coordinators or managers of the respective networks. However, since such networks contain multiple, and sometimes many, subprojects, there will be a large number of events that are only relevant in the context of these subprojects and thus only for a smaller group of project members.

The ideal solution for a calendar system would be one where, depending on a member's involvement in the different subprojects, project-specific calendars could be flexibly combined. This would allow one to create a research calendar that contains exactly those events that are relevant for a given individual.

Foldercase provides such a calendar system by allowing you to create a specific calendar for each of the projects part of a research collaboration or academic network. These calendars can then be flexibly combined with your team calendar, allowing you to compile a calendar that exactly fits to your involvement across the project landscape.

Note that the visibility of events in the project-specific, as well as the integrated calendar matches to the visibility settings that can be set for each event. Specifically, events can be declared as "visible", meaning that all members of the overarching network can see them. Alternatively, events can be declared as "private", meaning that only the members of the specific project for which the event was created, will be able to see them. This allows you to categorize events into those that are of more general relevance to all network members, such as workshops or seminars, and those that are relevant only to those directly involved in the project, such as project meetings or deadlines.

Foldercase also allows you to save meetings directly on your team's or network project's overview page. By doing so, you can increase the visibility of such events and highlight important meetings. Foldercase automatically creates entries for these events in your respective calendars, allowing you to combine them across projects, and to export them into your favourite calendar application.

We hope you find these research calendar features useful to keep a good overview of events, and to individualize calendars to the requirements of each project member.