Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Identifying New Ways to Collaborate
Collaboration within EPA, between agencies or other domestic institu-
tions, and between countries will be increasingly important for addressing the
complex problems of the 21st century, but it can be challenging to implement.
Incentive structures need to be appropriately aligned, and there need to be
mechanisms to facilitate collaboration among individuals or institutions that
have different disciplinary backgrounds, are geographically distributed, and
have different goals and objectives. Some collaboration will occur within single
disciplines, the primary objective being to share knowledge and best practices.
Others will seek to exchange knowledge across multiple disciplines, and this
may require substantial sustained work.
Regardless of the goal, one way to achieve collaboration is to create “sci-
entific exchange zones” for promoting interaction between disciplines, between
scientists and nonscientists, and between strategic research programs (Gorman
2010). Creating such scientific exchange zones involves
Allowing learning of the languages of multiple disciplines (for exam-
ple, social science, physical science, water science, risk science, and decision
science), which can be done via fellowships, internships, or short-term deploy-
ment from one program to another.
Defining common science questions and establishing common descrip-
tors.
Creating new and common research methods.
Identifying those who have top interactional expertise and training the
next generation in interactional expertise.
Developing and supporting experiential interactive projects.
Advances in information technologies (such as those discussed in Chapter
3 and Appendix D) are increasing opportunities for scientific exchange zones.
Physicist Michael Nielson identified two ways in which online tools can ad-
vance science—by expanding the array of scientific knowledge that can be
shared throughout the world and by changing the processes and scale of creative
collaboration (Nielsen 2012). Nielson argues for extreme openness in which “as
much information as possible is moved out of people's heads and labs, onto the
network” where it can be effectively used.
The scientific community has been generally slow to embrace that type of
sharing of knowledge, in part because of longstanding views about the need to
maintain proprietary methods and databases to enhance the reputation of experts
within focused content areas, a key criterion for promotion and tenure. However,
federally funded projects increasingly require mechanisms for sharing of meth-
ods and databases, and universities and other institutions are developing struc-
tures to reward collaborative research. EPA science would benefit from adopting
best practices of institutions that are trying to reward collaborative and open-
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