1st Crowdfight Symposium on the Science of Collaboration

The 1st Crowdfight Symposium on the Science of Collaboration was held online on June 15, 2021. You can watch the replay here

Science is teamwork towards a common goal, yet it feels like a competition. Can we do something about it?

This symposium explored the unique case of Crowdfight, a platform that attracted tens of thousands of scientists who selflessly donated their time and skill to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Crowdfight is now expanding to other fields. Can we apply its lessons to shift scientific culture towards a more generous and rewarding way of making science?

We discussed the following questions:

What is the difference between collaborating and helping each other, and why it matters.
The role of individual leadership in science (Should all scientists lead?)
How are scientific collaborations established? What alternatives can we imagine?
Should science be more or less specialized than it is now?
How do our current incentives (e.g. authorship in publications) shape our culture?
What opportunities to improve those incentives are offered by new technologies and by the cultural change imposed by the pandemic?
What are the main challenges to improve our incentives?

Program:

16:00 – Session 1: Crowdfight story, workflow and future plans
- Crowdfight story: Sara Arganda | Crowdfight co-founder and researcher at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
- Crowdfight workflow
  - Christian Gonzalez | Crowdfight project manager
  - Ana Morán | Crowdfight receiver, and researcher at the Center for Integrative Biology of Toulouse
  - Marie Vasse | Crowdfight coordinator, and researcher at the Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH-Zürich
  - Sandrine Coquille | Crowdfight advisor, and researcher at the University of Bayreuth
- Future plans and Q&A: Alfonso Pérez-Escudero | Crowdfight co-founder and researcher at the Center for Integrative Biology of Toulouse
17:00 – Session 2: Crowdfight from the point of view of the community.

Jarai Carter | Crowdfight volunteer, Data Scientist at John Deere and Lecturer at Columbia University
Vicent Parissi | Crowdfight volunteer & requester; Principal Investigator, Laboratoire de microbiologie fondamentale et pathogenicité
MFP UMR 5234 CNRS université de Bordeaux; Laboratoire Mobilty of Patbogenic Genome (MobileVIR)
Nyla Naim | Crowdfight volunteer, Senior Scientist, Addgene
Antonio Fernández-Anta | Crowdfight requester, Research Professor at IMDEA Networks, and Project Head of Coronasurveys
Fran Robson | Crowdfight volunteer and Senior Research Associate at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol

18:00 – Session 3: Roundtable on Science Collaboration and Open science.
- Brian Nosek | Co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science and professor at the Department of Psychology of the University of Virginia
- Benoit Giquel | Outreach and Business Development Manager at Addgene
- Stuart King | Research Culture Manager at eLife
- Pandelis Perakakis | Co-founder of Open Scholar and associate professor at the Psychology Department of Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

Organizers

María Hernández | Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Salamanca, Spain
Ana Morán | Research Center on Animal Cognition, Center for Integrative Biology, CNRS and Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
Christian González | Barcelona, Spain
Sara Arganda | Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
Francisco Romero-Ferrero | Champalimaud Research, Lisbon, Portugal
Alfonso Pérez-Escudero | Research Center on Animal Cognition, Center for Integrative Biology, CNRS and Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France