Partners in Research, Competitors in Pay

Early in his career, Russ Altman and members of his lab at Stanford University devised a new data analysis strategy. They drafted the manuscript about their approach and, before sending it to a computer science journal, showed it to the biologists whose raw data they had used. These colleagues expressed great distress at seeing their results in the methods paper, and insisted the team delay submitting the manuscript until they prepared a paper detailing the biological conclusions. Altman agreed

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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 ...

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  • Beth Schachter

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