We argue that while researchers note that coauthorship is an insufficient metric for international research collaboration there is little understanding about what else international co-authorship represents. Rather than focus on coauthorship solely as an output of research, we focus on the interaction between researchers involved in a co-authored paper. We therefore interview a range of researchers who had coauthored papers in a specific field - bio-fuels. From our interviews we find several factors driving collaboration such as different types of motivations, differences between researchers from the Global North and South, and differences between research rank among others. We then integrate these various factors together to postulate new models for the emergence of international research collaboration.