The mind-blowing progress achieved in communications technology allowed us to live in an increasingly interconnected world that couldn’t be foreseen before. Research collaboration is amongst the priority fields expected to benefit from this progress (Hall et al., 2018).
Evidently, research collaboration served to improve diagnosis and treatment by facilitating the development of consensus and evidence-based diagnosis guidelines and management recommendations (Jayne and Rasmussen, 2015; Crawford et al., 2015; Noordhoek et al., 2016). This may be particularly important for rare diseases (Julkowska et al., 2017; Cordero, 2020).
Research collaboration requires efficient common platforms. Examples of these platforms include the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and the ‘ELSI 2.0’ initiative (Yoshizawa et al., 2014), the English Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRCs) (Lockett et al., 2014), the European Multicentre Bronchiectasis Audit and Research Collaboration (EMBARC) project (Chalmers et al., 2017), the TransAtlantic RetroPeritoneal Sarcoma Working Group (TARPSWG) (van Houdt et al., 2019) and Commonwealth Neuroendocrine Tumour Research Collaboration (Singh et al., 2020).
The value of international research collaboration was magnificently expressed in the global management of the covid-19 crisis. In a short time, significant achievements have been made in understanding disease pathogenesis and developing diagnosis guidelines and therapeutic interventions (Kinsella et al., 2020). In the Arab World, research collaboration among Arab countries and between Arab countries and the rest of the world remains far behind the available potential. More outstanding efforts are needed to cover this gap (Sweileh et al., 2015; Aggarwal et al., 2020).

References
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