I’m fond of alliteration.
The research group I work with meets in a formal way regularly, about once a week, to discuss the business and developments. We’re not all working on the exact same thing, so there’s lots of learning involved. Often we’ll consider papers on similar subjects from other groups in distant places. Usually there’s a fair bit to critique in the wording of others’ papers, but almost always the intended meaning has been well thought out and adds value to our discussions. Sometimes we borrow ideas from other groups to test in our own way, and if it ever turns into something, there will be a citation somewhere noting the origins in our final work.
The authors of the contributing idea are acknowledged and have provided an advance to the science beyond their original intent. This is satisfactory. Possibly thrilling even if the result leads to something way bigger than originally imagined. But economics makes this complicated.
Funding for research, like any resource, is limited, and if it were thought that derivative work would likely be valuable and achievable, publishing results would probably be given low priority. Results get funding more often than not. But what’s the chance that all the possible derivative results can be had without collaboration? It depends. Generally it’s better to have more eyes looking at a problem together (if they can spare the time). It avoids needless repetition and often provides new sources for insight.
There was news recently that a large collaboration between drug companies, academics, and others made some real progress on detecting Alzheimer’s disease. It was also noted that such a collaboration was different from the way the researchers had done their work in the past.
There’s clearly a conflict. Competition inspires us to work harder than the other guy to get faster results, but collaboration inspires us with ideas we might not have otherwise had. I’m not sure what the answer is. This topic isn’t original, so there’s probably more complete discussion and proposed solutions elsewhere. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts. I guess collaboration wins long term.
But I also propose a model. Qualitative for now. There exists some optimum balance of competition and collaboration between researchers. Ignoring the details of the topic of research under consideration, the total available funding, now and in the future, for some topic determines the amount to which researchers compete and/or collaborate.
Is this obvious, already known, accurate, or written about elsewhere? Let me know.
