The Collaborative Era in Science: Governing the Network

212 Pages·2018·2.12 MB·English

by  Caroline S. Wagner

The Collaborative Era
in Science
Governing the Network
Caroline S. Wagner
Palgrave Advances in the Economics
of Innovation and Technology
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Caroline S. Wagner
The Collaborative Era
in Science
Governing the Network
Caroline S. Wagner
Glenn College of Public Affairs
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH, USA
Palgrave Advances in the Economics of Innovation and Technology
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reface wenTy irsT enTury cience
This book describes the global network of scientific collaboration that has
emerged in the 21st century. The network is one part of the innovation
process and feeds other parts of the larger knowledge economy. The book
is written as an aid to those who contribute to the network through sci-
ence policy, as they seek to use it or to evaluate it. It tells the story of the
rapid rise of international collaborations in science, technology, and inno-
vation which has been one of the most dramatic social changes of the
twenty-first century. The growth to scientific maturity of many developing
countries, especially China, has reshaped the global knowledge system and
created the conditions for the global network to emerge. The extra-
national nature of collaboration creates a new dynamic for policymakers,
educators, and business people who fund, manage, and rely upon this
system for a long list of social, economic, and knowledge benefits.
The growth of global science has exceeded the expectations of sociolo-
gists and science policy analysts and now constitutes a social system in its
own right. Mid-century students of science, thrilled with the rapid prog-
ress of science, could not imagine a future of exponential growth: Derek
de Solla Price (1963) forecasted that growth in output of scientific papers
would flatten out long before 2018. After all, in the physical world, no
system grows exponentially unabated. Science has been growing exponen-
tially for more than three centuries. Price predicted a point of “saturation”
of scientific output, one that has never been reached. The production of
scientific output in articles, patents, and products has blown through
expected limits to growth. A graph of scientific output shows the “hockey
v
vi PREFACE: TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SCIENCE
stick” of exponential growth (made famous by Michael Mann et al. (1999)
in describing climate change) as applying to scientific articles.
Science growth operates within a law of accelerating returns, described
by Moravec (1998), which suggests that, when growth reaches a barrier,
a new technology is invented to allow us to cross the barrier. Such may
be said of recent developments in the conduct of science, in that the
Internet and associated digital technologies overcame the barrier of
article production that was previously limited by paper. The invention of
digitized information, large-scale storage, and then the Internet has
created the conditions by which scientific knowledge output has
continued to grow at an accelerating pace. Digitization has also
contributed to wider diffusion of knowledge as well, which has
contributed to a virtuous cycle of capacity growth, especially in developing
and underdeveloped nations.
Science has expanded beyond boundaries of institutions, nations, and
the disciplines of the twentieth century. Along with this shift across barri-
ers (from paper to digital) has gone an accompanying phase shift from
scarcity to abundance. Until quite recently, scientific knowledge was a
scarce and precious resource. In the recent past (as it has been for three
centuries in the West), science required access to expensive journals. These
were printed on paper, mailed to subscribers, and often bound in leather
(being treated as the precious resource it was) for cataloging in elite librar-
ies. Accessing this codified knowledge meant expensive and time-
consuming travel, time away from home, relocation or collocation in
universities or research laboratory, and long time periods of mailing mate-
rials across long distances. Much knowledge is now electronically avail-
able. Of the materials that remain behind subscription-based “pay walls”
established to share journal articles, much of it is bulging at the seams of
those walls and beginning to spill out through sharing sites such as
ResearchGate, SciHub, and others.
abundance reorganizes science
The system created by the broad sharing of scientific knowledge operates
as abundant system. As much as half of 2017 scientific articles were pub-
lished in “open access” formats. Online, Google Scholar’s search engine
offers work-arounds to find articles that would otherwise be difficult to
access. Many websites provide access to scientific data. Other web-based
PREFACE: TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SCIENCE vii
services such as arXiv have scientific preprints online. All these sources and
services are new ways of sharing scientific knowledge.
The abundance of scientific knowledge available in digital form brings
with it many new norms, rules, and expectations for both science and the
mechanisms that support it. Policymakers and research managers are
facing an unknown or at least untested landscape. The most notable
change for them has been one pushing science toward openness, teaming,
cooperation, and collaboration. In fact, this book argues that openness is
the child of abundance, and it is the natural and expected development
emerging from the many new sources of knowledge. Many other changes
go along with these shifts. These are described in this book.
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an
unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and
scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment,
for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The
public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-
reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all
scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. (BOAI 2001)
The movement led to the creation of the Creative Commons and the
establishment of the Open Society Institute.
By “open access” … we mean its free availability on the public internet,
permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link
to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to
software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or
technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the
internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the
only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the
integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
(BOAI 2001)
Scientific collaborations grew rapidly as open sharing—a broader
concept than “open access”—has grown into a norm of research behavior.
Open sharing was facilitated by lower-cost and rapid travel, information
technologies, and open data. Each of these features converged to enable
distributed teaming by members who are geographically dispersed but
intellectually connected. These dispersed communities are networks—they
viii PREFACE: TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SCIENCE
are a social gathering of connections that extend beyond one’s home
institution or discipline, engage others, exchange ideas, and share tasks.
This process of connecting to colleagues, and then being reconnected by
them to yet other colleagues, is known as “search,” and it is increasingly
seen as a fundamental part of knowledge creation. Global knowledge
networks are the connections among researchers and research institutions
that are becoming the dominant form of organization for research.
A global knowledge network has come to dominate science in the early
twenty-first century, as I discussed in my book: The New Invisible College:
Science for Development (2008). The global network is the product of the
decisions of thousands of scientists to reach beyond the borders of labora-
tories within their home countries to seek out collaborators who can
enhance the knowledge-creating process. Collaborations overcome the
limitations imposed by organizational specialties. Long-distance collabo-
rations overcome the limitations imposed by social encumbrances (like
free riders and laggards). Collaborations bring new insights and possibili-
ties that were not available at close proximity. The result has been to create
a robust global knowledge network that is populated by prominent and
productive scientists. This book moves beyond my earlier work to discuss
the system at three levels (individual, team, and nation) and to present
governing guidelines for them.
New knowledge is increasingly created within these international net-
works—the work tends to be more highly cited by other scientists, and
funding is more often going to these projects rather than to solely national
ones. As knowledge is created by dispersed groups, the questions of exactly
where the knowledge “resides,” who “owns” it, who “controls” it become
issues for those who need to account for or use it. New entrants (busi-
nesses, students, those from developing countries) seeking to tap into this
knowledge may be having a harder time, since it is widely dispersed.
Finally, the global knowledge system operates like a network—with
dynamics different from the hierarchies or bureaucracies that might have
once been the homes of scientific research teams. It must be governed,
and governance must ensure the welfare of those who ultimately pay for
the public good to be created. To bring the knowledge from the global to
the local users, and to have it work effectively, users must understand the
emerging system and what motivates its participants.
Indeed, we find that political ties or national prestige do not motivate
the alliances of researchers within the global knowledge network. Thus,
the results of globally connected teams cannot be easily claimed as an asset
PREFACE: TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SCIENCE ix
by a single nation. Who “owns” the results of the Human Genome Project
(HGP)? This six-nation project had hundreds of adherents who have gone
on to use the resulting knowledge in myriad ways. In contrast to the secre-
tive Manhattan Project of the 1940s, the HGP contributed knowledge as
a “global public good” which seeded the genetics revolution. As a
knowledge- creating system, the global knowledge network’s breadth and
scope is unprecedented in history. It is exceedingly influential in that elite
scientists are populating it. As we shall see, the network operates according
to its own internal dynamics—ones that are beyond the direct control of
science policy makers but whose understanding will improve outcomes.
This book describes this network and details the importance of the net-
work for the future of scientific and technological research and develop-
ment, and the implications of it for public policy.
Human organizations, like living organisms, evolve in response to envi-
ronmental changes and challenges. In science, these challenges come in
response to new information, data, and opportunities to confirm or
develop new knowledge. New configurations and interconnections must
be grown organically to adjust and adapt to new information—just as bio-
chemistry emerged from the crossovers between biology and chemistry.
Nanotechnology emerged from the capacities provided by electron tun-
neling microscopes; new opportunities propelled atomic physics, materials
sciences, and chemistry in new directions and convergences. The new
knowledge forms are potent and productive. They create entirely new
opportunities for growth.
In response to these new signals, new organizational forms are
emerging, often superseding (but not necessarily eradicating) the ones
preceding them. In the current era, we have seen many global
organizational forms emerge in finance, media, and business—but these
do not remove the local or regional services. The global scientific network
is one more global system—it has similar features to these other global
enterprises, in that a new type of organization has emerged. However, it
is also different from these in its origins and structures because it produces
a public good—accordingly, its governance rules will differ from other
global systems.
Like other human endeavors, scientific organization responds to
external and internal changes working according to systemic mechanisms.
Changes in one aspect of the system changes dynamics for all other parts.
For twenty-first-century science, nearly all the parts have changed. One
change has been the opportunity afforded by simply more scientists