Team work

BETHESDA, MD— The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and academia need to do more to stimulate and reward so-called team science efforts and to tweak a system that for decades has been designed to focus on the individual principal investigator, concluded participants in a symposium held last week. More than 300 scientists, administrators, and journal editors from a variety of disciplines examined the role and ideal formulation of "team science" as part of an annual NIH Bioengineering Consortium (BECON) symposium. "For years, many have been watching federal agencies and saying that 'interdisciplinary work is important'," symposium Co-chair Janie Fouke of Michigan State University told The Scientist. "But they haven't been moving fast enough in terms of university and government mechanisms." Fouke added that the bioengineering field is uniquely positioned to discuss team science since its practitioners have been doing interdisciplinary team science for decades, for example, in order to develop imaging technologies. "I hope we'll come away from meeting with specific things we can take back to our universities with regard to things like the administration of multiinvestigator awards, promotion, and academic advancement," she said. Teams are often formed in hopes of making breakthroughs at disciplinary boundaries, and team science endeavors bring together a critical mass of investigators to share infrastructure and resources for projects that are too large for a single lab, explained speaker Edward Holmes of the University of California, San Diego. But different types of teams face different sorts of challenges, he added. Problems for members of cross-school teams include different length academic appointments for different departments and different criteria for promotion. Members of cross-institution teams must cope with contrasting institutional missions, reagent and animal transfer, and technology transfer issues. Difficulties for academic private sector collaborations include determining publication rights and ensuring that teaching duties are fulfilled without undue influence from the industry project. At a facility like Harvard's Institute for Chemistry and Cell Biology (ICCB), team science requires an integration of not only science, but also science cultures, noted Timothy Mitchison, professor of biology and co-director of the ICCB. Academic chemists and biologists each have distinct goals and traditions regarding what's a discovery and how careers are organized, he said, therefore scientists need truly interdisciplinary peer review. And the interdisciplinary training at the ICCB also serves young scientists hoping to move on to elite faculty positions elsewhere differently. Biologists, who are expected to have an interdisciplinary background, are often better off than chemists, Mitchison said. Chemists who join the ICCB know that they're taking something of a career risk. Earlier this month, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report urging universities to revise tenure and promotion practices to protect and reward participants in large-scale science projects. Michael Metzker, an assistant professor of molecular and human genetics at the Baylor College of Medicine and a member of the rat genome sequencing team, further elaborated on the toll that team science can take on an individual's career prospects. As part of the sequencing team, Metzker has had to devote half of his time to the project, making it "very hard to be competitive with the assistant professor down the hall who only has his lab to be responsible for." As one of the breakout session moderators, Joan Lorden of the University of Alabama, put it, the system should not "let team science be a career killer." Metzker went on to list a variety of downsides to participating in a large sequencing team like his: Securing one's own grant money can be more difficult since there's a perception among funders that there's already plenty of money at the center. Team members must overcome the perception in the university community that their work hasn't included the skills necessary for independent research. A project like genome sequencing is often not considered "real science," but rather blindly churning out data. It's hard to attract graduate students and postdocs, who fear that their participation could hamper their career. And publication exposure, so important for an assistant professor hoping to advance, is lessened when he or she is listed as one of many authors on "mega papers." Garnering proper recognition for one's contribution is only one of several authorship-related issues that must be addressed as the number of authors per paper continues to grow, according to Journal of the American Medical Association Editor Drummond Rennie. His informal analyses suggest that 6 to 20% of papers submitted have "guest" authors who, though listed, did not contribute to the research, and 12% have "ghost" authors who contributed but are not listed. He advocates complete disclosure of which authors did what, though others said such a requirement would be too cumbersome. Rennie also suggested that teams be required to make one or more authors guarantors of the data reported so that there's little chance of finger pointing if the data are questioned. Rennie's recommendations were incorporated with those of journal editors and others who engaged in the breakout session titled, "Credit and Ownership Issues Related to the Publication of Team Science." His group's other suggestions included getting technology transfer officers involved early on in the publication process or even making them "part of the team." Recommendations from other breakout sessions included holding an NIH workshop to discuss how authors' credit is assigned, developing new models with program officers for assembling and monitoring funding, and providing grant supplements to support disciplinary "boundary crossing" activities. Providing more seed funds for young team science faculty, establishing a pilot grant mechanism to assess potential teams' leadership ability and organizational structure, and organizing study sections that include members with experience in team science were also recommended. Additional projects suggested included developing an award to institutions and/or teams for their team science accomplishments and creating a handbook of good practices for promoting and assessing individual team performance. Fouke said that organizers hadn't yet determined how the results of the symposium will be released. Possibilities include publication in a bound volume, a magazine, or on a Web site, or dissemination via an email listserv and/or directly to university administrators. Organizers also plan to set up a mechanism for submitting further feedback electronically.

Team work

The Scientist ARCHIVES

Become a Member of

Meet the Author

Eugene Russo

Related Research Resources

What Is the Amniotic Fluid Composed of?

Research Resources

Podcasts

Webinars

Videos

Infographics

eBooks

Skip the Wait for Protein Stability Data with Aunty

An Automated DNA-to-Data Framework for Production-Scale Sequencing

Exploring Cellular Organization with Spatial Proteomics

Organoid Origins and How to Grow Them

Products

Product News

BRANDTECH Scientific Introduces the Transferpette® pro Micropipette: A New Twist on Comfort and Control

Biotium Launches GlycoLiner™ Cell Surface Glycoprotein Labeling Kits for Rapid and Selective Cell Surface Imaging

Thermo Scientific X and S Series General Purpose Centrifuges

VANTAstar Flexible microplate reader with simplified workflows