ReOps CEO Holly Cole makes the case for research incentives
By Russ Rizzo|4 min read|Updated Jul 15, 2022
When Holly Cole joined a fledgling online community of research operations professionals as its ninth(ish) member, she couldn't have imagined it would grow into the standard bearer for the fast-growing research operations profession.
In a little over four years, the ReOps (short for “research operations”) community amassed nearly 12,000 members across the globe. They volunteer to help build processes and frameworks to bring standardization to new and growing teams of researchers. Cole, as co-chair and CEO of the community, has a pulse on the industry, the challenges it faces, and how strategies are evolving (or need to evolve) to adapt.
“I don't know any larger scale volunteer projects out there,” said Cole. “We put on workshops in over 100 countries. It’s intense how many data points we collect. And it’s all volunteer work. That’s something we're super proud of.”
Cole, a longtime researcher, linked up with people like Brigette Metzler and Emma Boulton to grow the organization from a message board with a handful of people to a global network of volunteers actively sharing experiences and knowledge.
The way Cole sees it, this was a community that was hungry to convene and find ways to help one another.
“The tank was already full of gas,” Cole said. “We really just kind of lit the match.”
One of the community’s first projects resulted in a stunning “flower graphic