Scientific collaboration - past, present and future.

The Royal Society seeks help with planning a publication on scientific collaboration and is inviting contributions from academics in science studies & history of science.

The Royal Society intends to compile a small collection of case studies of scientific collaboration, as part of its work on the future culture of science. (See https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/research-culture/).

The collection will cover a range of topics, and scales of project, to illuminate the conditions - institutional, cultural, political, intellectual - that enable or constrain successful collaboration. Potential case studies, and the questions one might ask about them to illuminate discussion of future science policy, will be discussed at a workshop at the Society in October.

We would welcome suggestions for stories of collaboration that might be informative in this regard. Ideally, they will be stories which are already documented, or would be relatively straightforward to document, and which someone (perhaps you?) might envisage writing up in an easily accessible style in a few thousand words.


The plan is that the majority, perhaps all, the authors in the publication that appears next year will be scholars in history of science and science studies. A small number (between 5-10) of paid writing commissions will follow the October workshop. The collection will be edited for the Society and summarised by Dr Jon Turney (www.jonturney.co.uk).