Guidelines for Negotiating Scientific Collaboration

0963 T he scientifi c enterprise refl ects the willingness of scientists to collaborate implicitly with people they don't know personally: investigators routinely obtain antibodies, enzymes, sterile supplies, and other items from commercial suppliers without hardly blinking, and often without knowing anything about the companies other than what appears on the sales brochures. This system works because of basic warranties and expectations, as well as competition among companies to maintain high quality standards and easy, quick availability of specialized reagents. It is no exaggeration to say that vendors, as de facto scientifi c collaborators, are a major driving force in scientifi c productivity. In contrast, many scientists are far more reluctant to enter into explicit collaborations with other academic scientists, even those who are well respected and well established, unless they have a strong prior personal relationship with them. Why? There are many concerns that a scientist might have that could outweigh the potential advantages of collaboration with another academic. Unlike a commercial vendor, whose participation is passive and circumscribed, an academic collaborator is likely to argue passionately about the design of the experiments, may not agree with the underlying hypothesis, might engage in experiments that lack certain perceived controls or quality standards, or may simply lose momentum (e.g., if the lab loses grant support, or if a student in the lab leaves who was doing the experiments). Even after the basic experiments are fi nished, an academic collaborator might delay or even prevent publication by insisting on the need for further experiments, proper credit, a certain author name order, having intellectual property rights, submitting to a certain journal, and so on. Doing scientifi c research is a highly personal and subjective activity, so that it is diffi cult to put two investigators together at random and expect them to see eye-to-eye. Also, each member of the collaboration is privy to valuable unpublished data, facts, ideas, and hypotheses that they are loathe to disclose to the other without good reason. Making a commitment to collaborate fully with another laboratory is far from a trivial decision. Thus, collaborations tend to fall into one of two categories at opposite ends of the spectrum: on the one hand, the passive or one-sided vendor model, where a person supplies a reagent with minimal warranties and expectations; and on the other hand, the active collaborator model, where two or more investigators are fully engaged in …