Collaboration: Reforming Research

8 Collaboration: Reforming Research

Most researchers’ response to the word ‘collaboration’ is overwhelm‐ingly positive. Many of the most influential scientific breakthroughs that have gone on to shape today’s scientific landscape have been the product of collaborations: Gates and Allen, the Wright brothers, and Watson, Crick and Franklin, to name a few.

The global value of collaboration can be seen best in worldwide projects such as the Human Genome Project, by far the world’s largest biological collab‐orative effort. The project combined work from 20 universities in six countries to map the 92.1% of the human nucleotide sequence, with the work using pub‐lic funding from the National Institutes of Health and multiple other interna‐tional research groups.

Alongside physical collaboration, software development has also aided a more inclusive scientific approach. The Open Science Framework (OSF), cre‐ated in 2013 by the Center for Open Science, encourages the production of

publicly available projects by allowing research‐ers to register them, from individual experiments to the research goal of an entire lab, in a way that allows their progress and contributions to be re‐corded easily. The merits of collaboration have not only been supported by large scale and well-funded pro‐jects such as the OSF, but also verified by a range of individual studies, usually taking the form of systematic reviews. One paper, investigating the importance of collaboration in creating influen‐tial research, found a positive correlation between the number of named contributors and the number of citations the paper gained. The physical distance between the collaborators’ countries even had a beneficial effect on the pa‐per’s influence (as measured by citation level). With so many benefits, it is hard to under‐stand why some researchers may avoid collabor‐ation. One reason for this may be concern over lack of recognition. This can become especially problematic if the terms of authorship are not agreed before the research commences. Grants and funding are often only awarded to individu‐als so early career researchers may feel that col‐laboration is detrimental, given funding scarcity and employment instability. But, with the cor‐rect levels of communication and effort, collab‐orative work can provide a stepping stone to opportunity, providing both individuals and or‐ganisations with new insights and previously un‐discovered pools of expertise.

Ask the same question about collaboration to members of the general public and you may get a less positive response, especially when the word ‘collaboration’ is combined with the word ‘sci‐ence’. Collaborations which affect the wider population are often very different to those ex‐perienced by scientists. These collaborations, perhaps between health charities, funding bod‐ies, organisations such as the NHS and commer‐cial companies, have a far wider impact than smaller partnerships between two groups of re‐searchers. In these cases, collaboration can often be dangerously entangled with vested interests. Take the example of CRUK with their latest campaign, ‘Obesity causes cancer’, causing social media outrage with perceived fat-phobic im‐agery. Many claimed that the company disreg‐arded other influences of obesity risk, implying obesity is a choice, and the anger was further fuelled by CRUK’s connection with Slimming World as a donor, leading to conflict of interest accusations towards CRUK.

In July, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) pro‐voked social media outrage upon revealing their latest campaign ‘Obesity causes cancer’, with gi‐ant posters of cigarette cartons with ‘Obesity causes cancer too’ plastered across them. Many claimed that the images were fat-phobic due to their suggestion that obesity is a choice in the same way as choosing to smoke. The campaign disregarded other factors that influence an indi‐vidual’s risk of obesity, such as gender, race and income. This anger was fuelled by CRUK’s part‐nership with Slimming World, the organisation donating over £14 million to the charity since 2013. By using money donated by a company that sells the promise of weight loss to fund re‐search used to justify scaring people into losing weight, CRUK found themselves in the middle of a storm, facing accusations of a conflict of in‐terest.

The key paper behind the campaign, pub‐lished in 2015, aimed to investigate the effect of lifestyle factors on cancer risk, including obesity, using Body Mass Index (BMI) as a measure. BMI has already been heavily criticised by experts for being an ineffective measure of weight-related health, as it does not take into consideration muscle mass or fat distribution around the body. Ruth Travis, an associate professor and senior molecular epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, stated, “Factors influencing BMI in in‐“With so many benefits, it is hard to understand why some researchers may avoid collaboration.” “The global value of collaboration can be seen best in worldwide projects” Perspective