Abstract
The scientific enterprise reflects the willingness of scientists to collaborate implicitly with people they don't know personally: investigators routinely obtain antibodies, enzymes, sterile supplies, and other items from commercial suppliers without hardly blinking, and often without knowing anything about the companies other than what appears on the sales brochures. This system works because of basic warranties and expectations, as well as competition among companies to maintain high quality standards and easy, quick availability of specialized reagents. It is no exaggeration to say that vendors, as de facto scientific collaborators, are a major driving force in scientific productivity.
Highlights
Many scientists are far more reluctant to enter into explicit collaborations with other academic scientists, even those who are well respected and well established, unless they have a strong prior personal relationship with them
Collaborations tend to fall into one of two categories at opposite ends of the spectrum: on the one hand, the passive or one-sided vendor model, where a person supplies a reagent with minimal warranties and expectations; and on the other hand, the active collaborator model, where two or more investigators are fully engaged in a common pursuit with full sharing of ideas and credit. This leaves an enormous set of potential opportunities in the middle, consisting of limited collaborations that could be mutually fruitful, but that often cannot get started or be sustained because of uncertainty and lack of trust
We suggest that it is possible to encourage more of these limited collaborations to proceed by providing a list of the key points to be considered at the onset of a collaboration
Summary
Many scientists are far more reluctant to enter into explicit collaborations with other academic scientists, even those who are well respected and well established, unless they have a strong prior personal relationship with them. Minimal guidelines for sharing of reagents and data have been widely discussed (e.g., [1–6]), to our knowledge, no one has explicitly enumerated the points of collaboration that should be negotiated between two academic biomedical investigators. As negotiations of intellectual property issues generally involve additional parties such as host institutions and funding agencies and are not solely under the control of the two collaborators, a detailed consideration of such issues falls beyond the scope of the present guidelines.
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