Altman agreed to temporarily shelve the manuscript. He also made a mental note to himself: Start the discussion about manuscripts and authorships at the beginning of the project. "It's one thing to have a hard conversation before any of the results are in," he relates. "But it's another to start talking when the results are already in, and you realize that you never really talked about distributing the credit in the publications." Altman, who is an associate professor of genetics and medicine at Stanford, makes many such notes to himself as he coordinates the work of interdisciplinary teams in an academic setting.
Such coordination has become critical because understanding data—in genomics, cognitive neuroscience, or ecological biodiversity—increasingly involves collaborations between research groups with different specialties. These collaborative networks are the nexus of the new European Research Area's planned €17,000 million program to boost competitiveness with the United States with genomics and ...
