Who'd want to work in a team?

摘要

Team science is everywhere these days. The trouble is, you'd never guess it from an inspection of the universities that house it or the agencies that fund and supposedly foster it. Last week, a meeting at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) on "Catalyzing team science" highlighted the difficulties, and proposed some solutions. What should disturb everybody is how far from reality many of those solutions are. In one sense the challenges are nothing new. Particle and space physicists have been doing team science for decades. But many of those enterprises grew up around major facilities or dedicated institutions. Their goals were clear at the outset, and structures, processes and cultures developed accordingly. Furthermore, the disciplines involved ― physics, astronomy, engineering and computation ― are far from alien to one another.