6 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 296 — 2018 Radical Collaboration and Research Data Management: An Introduction Nancy Y. McGovern, Director, Digital Preservation, MIT Libraries Radical Collaboration: Framing the Concept1 Engaging in good practice for managing digital content and collections for the long-term increasingly brings domains together in new and/or unfamiliar ways. Addressing short- and long-term opportunities and challenges for research data management brings together diverse skills, experience, and perspectives of creators and curators across archives, libraries, museums and other academic organizations. As a scenario for exploring radical collaboration, research data management is ideal—a timely and high-profile community space that benefits from and increasingly requires working together to achieve common objectives. The concept of radical collaboration means coming together across disparate, but engaged, domains in ways that are often unfamiliar or possibly uncomfortable to member organizations and individuals in order to identify and solve problems together, to achieve more together than we could separately. In this discussion, radical collaboration adapts the concept of radical candor to the desire and need to work together productively and collectively. This introduction provides working definitions of key concepts and terms to make radical collaboration possible, explores some possible approaches and opportunities, and suggests some considerations and implications for engaging in radical collaboration. In subsequent sections of this issue of RLI, contributing authors explore examples …radical collaboration means coming together across disparate, but engaged, domains in ways that are often unfamiliar or possibly uncomfortable…to achieve more together than we could separately.