Research collaboration: an important trend

We've seen that collaboration is an essential element in research. In fact, the NIH has been encouraging it for a while. Now this article in the NY Times makes the case that the threat posed by global warming  is driving collaboration on an entirely new scale.

The political landscape of academia, combined with the fight for grant money, has always fostered competition far more than collaboration.

But the threat of global warming may just change all that.

Notably, the joint effort between public and private entities is striving for fast results, as opposed to the longer lifecycle of purely scientific or academic research.

And this follow-up letter from a reader rightly states that:

Universities, by contrast, are in position to deliver the groundbreaking discoveries today that will change how we live, work and play tomorrow.

Comments

[Dave Cassidy]

The NIH is actually funding a bunch of initiatives to encourage and facilitate research collaboration among federal grantees. One example is the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC; see http://www.nitrc.org ) [disclaimer: our company is building/operating NITRC], part of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience. This is a fantastic trend, in my opinion, because it speaks to the need to extract every possible piece of value from every grant dollar (read: tax dollar) expended by the government.