ETHICS OF COLLABORATION - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 126

ethical appraisal and constant assessment of the scientifi c community and the
scientifi c project. Or, as Thagard [8] argued, people in the sciences, or any
discipline, who wish to collaborate need to have some procedural knowledge
of how to collaborate.
The procedural knowledge should certainly involve cultural awareness. If
communication is necessary for full accountability, visibility, and transparency,
then individuals involved in a collaborative activity should be culturally knowl-
edgeable of differences in communication and communicative practices. The
demand for this knowledge is reciprocal in that each individual assumes the
responsibility for acquisition of knowledge related to other participant's
culture.
Disciplinary communication can also hinder collaborative activity. If we
look at the peer-different collaboration proposed by Thagard [6], we see that
often the difference is in education and discipline-specifi c knowledge. For
instance, different disciplines have different ideas about what constitutes a
standard of proof, what laboratory practices are customary, or how observa-
tions are expressed. Again, it is imperative that the assorted diffi culties that
might arise in a peer-different collaboration be addressed at the start of the
collaborative activity.
Furthermore, individuals themselves communicate differently. People speak
with different infl ection, different vocabulary, different gestures, and so on. If
the heart of any collaboration is trust, as several people noted above, then
each individual has the responsibility of encountering other individuals with
good will and commitment. The responsibility means that the individual must
care about the other people so that care about what they say becomes natural.
Within the fi eld of chemistry, knowledge and advancement were classically
(150 years ago) shared through society meetings wherein a single presenter
would invite peers and nobility to an exhibition/seminar on his or her particu-
lar research. The lecturer would expound on fi ndings within his or her (gener-
ally) laboratory and its implications to society. While the audience would
include laypersons and scientists alike, so few suffi cient laboratories were in
existence during these times that to duplicate a presenter's fi ndings would not
be trivial and attribution of the fi ndings would indeed directly go to the
presenter.
In today's culture, achievements and advances in science are also shared via
lectureships and conferences; the primary difference is that there is a greater
likelihood that members of the audience include scientists whose laboratories
could quickly reproduce the presented fi ndings. To present cutting-edge
research that has yet to be published requires a modicum of trust in the audi-
ence and a moral minimalism in the behavior of the audience. Discussions
among like-minded research groups that begin at a conference can often lead
to future collaboration provided cooperation and attribution are appropriate.
One consequence of trust and the impulse toward greater awareness of
cultural, disciplinary, and personal communication is a more inclusive team of