In your experience, what is the biggest challenge to global scientific collaboration? How should it be addressed?

NICOLÁS BONEL

Science

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE

Año: 2014 vol. 346 p. 47 - 49

Global collaborative projects bring together scientists worldwide from different areas of expertise, allowing the investigation of a problem from multiple angles and yielding results that would have been impossible without a multidisciplinary consortium. Global scientific collaboration, however, does not always produce global knowledge. I believe that certain economic and social variables manage to block the globalization of knowledge. Science is being ruled by a strong commercialization process where scientific outcome is considered a commodity. As such, the transfer and dissemination of knowledge are guided by economic considerations, and, as a consequence, scientists often find financial or legal restrictions to get full access to knowledge. The spread of knowledge to the nonscientific community is also being limited. Scientists are usually reluctant to become involved in outreach activities if those efforts do not represent a direct benefit to their careers. Furthermore, scientific outcomes are not always adequately decodified into comprehensible information accessible by a general audience. Within this context, a gap exists and needs to be filled between global collaboration and global knowledge. To overcome this problem, I believe that scientific journals should necessarily adopt an entirely open-access policy. Moreover, researchers should be responsible for communicating their scientific outcomes to a general audience and do so in such a way that the concepts can be understood by nonspecialists, thereby improving the public´s understanding of science. So far, we have managed to establish successful global scientific collaborations; our next goal, however, should be to implement strategies to ensure an effective globalization of the resulting knowledge.