Donor assistance and governance of science

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From: John Daly <john.daly@gmail.com>Date: Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 11:17 AMSubject: [Thoughts About K4D] The New Invisible College: Science for DevelopmentTo: john.daly@gmail.com
[http://www.carolinewagner.net/]
I have just read The New Invisible College: Science for Development by Caroline Wagner.
As expected from one of the world's leading experts on international science and technology, it is very good.I have known Caroline for years. We are now both on the faculty of George Washington University (albeit in different schools). We worked together on a White House conference on Biotechnology, and have appeared together on panels. More fundamentally, she is the author of a series of reports going back decades which quantified the nature of international scientific collaboration -- reports which informed my own beliefs and work.The book counterposes the internationalization of science through increasingly elaborated global networks of collaboration against the concentration of activity in scientific clusters primarily located in rich countries. (There is a great map showing these clusters, based on publication counts.) Her use of social network analysis to illuminate the changing nature of the global scientific system is especially innovative and illuminating.The book is not only dry statistics, but includes appropriate illustrative examples of research projects and interviews with key informants, making it readable and indeed a pleasant read.The final chapter provides some thoughtful and important recommendations for science policy in developed and developing nations.
My hat is off to Caroline!

Response from John Daly

It occurs to me that there may be a deep parallel in your book's exposition that might be worth exploring.One might consider two spaces. One is our ordinary geographic space. The other is more complex. You have defined a network in which scientists are nodes and coauthored papers are links. One can define metrics on this network, describing the distance between scientists in terms of the numbers and strengths of the linkages between them in the network.There are centripetal forces in both spaces resulting in clustering of scientists. In geographic space scientists cluster in cities which are poles of scientific ferment. in the network space I think scientists cluster around hubs, which may perhaps be especially collaborative scientists or subnetworks of scientists collaborating on a specific subfield of science. I would think that as some geographic areas have many cities as clusters of scientific activities, so to there are larger areas in your network with many clusters of activity that are close to each other.In both cases there are complementary forces: scientists make independent choices as to where to work, based on their interests and on an assessment that the benefits of working in a cluster are worth the costs of doing so; people at the center of the cluster seek to attract others to work with them, again based on an assessment that the costs of attracting others are more than justified by the benefits the others will bring to the cluster.Maps, as we usually draw them, may not be very good at reflecting the difficulty of traveling from one place to another. We could alternatively seek a map based on travel times or on travel costs. So too, the European Union has decreased the difficulty of moving from one scientific center in Europe to another. So conceptualizing a space with both intellectual and geographic dimension to fully describe distance does not seem too odd.In both geography and "coauthorship" space, I think there are centrifugal as well as centripetal forces. In both cases there are scientific needs and opportunities to be explored outside of the major clusters.-- John Daly
http://www.geocities.com/stconsultant/
http://stconsultant.blogspot.com/
http://unescoscience.blogspot.com/
http://unescoeducation.blogspot.com/

Response to John Daly

Hi John,
Thank you so much for reading the book. I am really glad to know it is interesting to you. Your comments reveal how much time you have spent working on these questions...of course, you are right about international collaborations having to be worth the effort. But what is the incentive to make that extra effort across cultural, time, and language barriers? You are right that transaction costs have gone down, but with that, the number of opportunities have gone up, so people need to choose more carefully than before. I suggest that international collaboration is more attractive precisely because it can be ended relatively easily compared to side-by-side collaboration. Its existence suggests that it must be worth the effort or people wouldn't engage in it in the first place, and it is sustained because it brings value. It is attractive because it does not carry the same social weight as proximate collaboration. And, it encourages people who a re well known to seek out other well known people (basing collaborations on reputation) which I suggest is why the more renowned you are the more likely it is that you are working at the international level. Is all this good for science? not sure, but developing countries need to understand the dynamic in order to use science to build social welfare.
I do not have much interaction with UNESCO, so I am not a good person to talk about their positions on science. But I will recommend the class to students who are interested in that topic.
Again, thanks so much for reading and commenting on my book.
Caroline

Comments from John Daly

I will probably finish it over the weekend.I don't know whether you have seen this:http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_00978It seems to suggest that (Internet mediated) access to scientific publications leads researchers in developing nations to publish more themselves.I am trying to get my mind around the networking results that you present. Certainly the increases in coauthorship and international coauthorship are interesting and deserving of explanation. I think your ideas of self organizing networks of researchers are helpful and go a long way to explain the structure of the scientific communities that are forming. It seems to me that your rule for establishing a linkage might be adapted slightly. The question is whether the collaboration is worth the effort. Will the advantages obtained by entering the collaboration outweigh the costs and difficulties of the collaboration? The impact of improved communication and transportation systems is important in that respect. As the transaction costs go down and as do the delays, then collaborations with lesser gains become more attractive.Let me make a point that has interested me for some time. A scientist can choose to cooperate with a scientist in his country or abroad. Probably half the working scientists in the world were in the United States in 1950; now something like one-third of all working scientists living here. (I haven't looked it up.) That in itself makes it more likely that a U.S. scientist will collaborate with a foreign scientist in 2008 than in 1950. But for all the other 193 countries, their working scientists will face a greater ratio of foreign to domestic scientists. Therefore, I would expect, even were all other things equal, that the ratio of international to domestic collaborations would be higher in other countries than in the United States, (Of course, not everything is equal. It is easier for a scientist in a small country like Belgium, surrounded by other developed nations, to travel to another country than it is for an Ameerican scientist to cross the ocean to collaborate. The EU has established a lot of money to encourage cross-national European collaborations; developing country scientists often depend on collaborations with developed nation scientists to work at all, and are more likely to publish if involved in such collaborations.) Again, it was once the case that Americans accounted for half of all scientific publications, and now account for something like a third. If publications from foreign scientists, working in smaller scientific communities, are more likely to be internationally coauthored, then the higher percentage of foreign authored papers in the mix would account for an increase in international coauthorships in the total. I hope I have made the point clear. Have you been looking at the use of network analysis to identify core groups of research collaborators, surrounded by larger communities of practice, and still larger communities of interest?
John Daly

Book is now available

The New Invisible College: Science for Development is now available from Brookings Press. Please post comments here.  Thank you!

Caroline