Putting Collaboration Data at the Core of Scientific Endeavour

Collaboration is at the core of the new model of R&D. The requirement to share ideas, information and experimental work remains intrinsic to the scientific process. 

In today’s communications-driven world, the ability to collaborate across time zones and nations has made organisations eager to access external talent and resources that were, until very recently, kept firmly behind the high walls of multinational organisations. The wires are humming with new expressions of this trend: externalisation, globalisation, virtualisation, open collaboration and open innovation. In the world of Web 2.0 this concept is infectious. Significant time, effort and business development are used to develop networks of global relationships but is it sufficient just to increase the network of collaborators without thought to the end product of all this collaboration - the data? Research shows most scientific data in collaborative networks is shared via documented reports or rudimentary, summarised data. Trading documents when you should be trading data reduces the effectiveness of collaboration and can lead to loss of the very IP the collaboration was designed to create.