The 1st Crowdfight Symposium on the Science of Collaboration was held online on June 15, 2021. You can watch the replay here.
Science is teamwork towards a common goal, yet it feels like a competition. Can we do something about it?
This symposium explored the unique case of Crowdfight, a platform that attracted tens of thousands of scientists who selflessly donated their time and skill to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Crowdfight is now expanding to other fields. Can we apply its lessons to shift scientific culture towards a more generous and rewarding way of making science?
We discussed the following questions:
- What is the difference between collaborating and helping each other, and why it matters.
- The role of individual leadership in science (Should all scientists lead?)
- How are scientific collaborations established? What alternatives can we imagine?
- Should science be more or less specialized than it is now?
- How do our current incentives (e.g. authorship in publications) shape our culture?
- What opportunities to improve those incentives are offered by new technologies and by the cultural change imposed by the pandemic?
- What are the main challenges to improve our incentives?
Program:
- 16:00 – Session 1: Crowdfight story, workflow and future plans
- Crowdfight story: Sara Arganda | Crowdfight co-founder and researcher at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
- Crowdfight workflow
- Christian Gonzalez | Crowdfight project manager
- Ana Morán | Crowdfight receiver, and researcher at the Center for Integrative Biology of Toulouse
- Marie Vasse | Crowdfight coordinator, and researcher at the Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH-Zürich
- Sandrine Coquille | Crowdfight advisor, and researcher at the University of Bayreuth
- Future plans and Q&A: Alfonso Pérez-Escudero | Crowdfight co-founder and researcher at the Center for Integrative Biology of Toulouse
- 17:00 – Session 2: Crowdfight from the point of view of the community.
- Jarai Carter | Crowdfight volunteer, Data Scientist at John Deere and Lecturer at Columbia University
- Vicent Parissi | Crowdfight volunteer & requester; Principal Investigator, Laboratoire de microbiologie fondamentale et pathogenicité
MFP UMR 5234 CNRS université de Bordeaux; Laboratoire Mobilty of Patbogenic Genome (MobileVIR)
- Nyla Naim | Crowdfight volunteer, Senior Scientist, Addgene
- Antonio Fernández-Anta | Crowdfight requester, Research Professor at IMDEA Networks, and Project Head of Coronasurveys
- Fran Robson | Crowdfight volunteer and Senior Research Associate at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol
- 18:00 – Session 3: Roundtable on Science Collaboration and Open science.
- Brian Nosek | Co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science and professor at the Department of Psychology of the University of Virginia
- Benoit Giquel | Outreach and Business Development Manager at Addgene
- Stuart King | Research Culture Manager at eLife
- Pandelis Perakakis | Co-founder of Open Scholar and associate professor at the Psychology Department of Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Organizers
- María Hernández | Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Salamanca, Spain
- Ana Morán | Research Center on Animal Cognition, Center for Integrative Biology, CNRS and Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
- Christian González | Barcelona, Spain
- Sara Arganda | Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
- Francisco Romero-Ferrero | Champalimaud Research, Lisbon, Portugal
- Alfonso Pérez-Escudero | Research Center on Animal Cognition, Center for Integrative Biology, CNRS and Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
