If science is to help solve the world’s most important problems in improving human health, protecting the environment, and ensuring national security, scientific research must be transparent and collaborative.

In the United States, the openness that scientists observe in their work reflects the openness of American society. It is the work environment that adheres to transparency that attracts talent from around the world.

In addition, the talent of scientists from diverse backgrounds working in the U.S. promotes constructive collaboration.

“It’s great when scientists want to come from abroad and work with Americans because they think we have an extremely positive scientific culture,” said Richard Freeman, a Harvard University economist who has studied the relationship between different kinds of collaborations and academic citations. – People from so many different backgrounds from so many countries work here – I think that strengthens American science.

In some countries, research is strictly controlled. “There are all sorts of ethics and oversight issues when everything is done in a closed system, without proper monitoring and without input from the entire scientific community,” said Alex Joske, a researcher at the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy’s International Cyber Policy Center. Moreover, “if the direction of research is too tightly controlled, it doesn’t allow for creativity and new ideas.”

According to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s 2018 data, the U.S. international collaboration rate was 37 percent, up 12 percent from 2006.

Freeman’s research at Harvard showed that the more diverse the research collaboration, the greater the impact of experimentation. In a paper published in 2014, Freeman and his colleague Wei Huang concluded that when co-investigators had different ethnic backgrounds, their publications were more likely to be cited.

“The quality of the research articles may not have been higher,” Freeman said. – But they had more readers, and more readers for a scientific article is a good thing in itself.” The extra attention means that other scientists are likely to try to recreate the experiment or extend its results.

Government sponsors scientific research
According to the same 2018 data provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the federal government remains the largest funder of basic research; it accounts for 44 percent of the total.

“One of the things about the publicly funded research model that we have in this country is that it really allows these more esoteric and foundational questions to be studied,” said Michael Weisberg, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where his research focuses on the philosophy of science. – If this were a private scientific enterprise, we would never be able to do the kind of research we do.”

Weisberg said that because basic science is largely funded by taxpayers, government funding agencies such as the U.S. National Science Foundation require that researchers applying for federal grants demonstrate in their proposals that their work has “broader impact,” or the research project has the potential to benefit society. This encourages scientists to develop scientific knowledge as responsible citizens.

“Open science is about the transparent and inclusive workings of the scientific process,” explained Brian Nosek, head of the Center for Open Science, which provides online tools for scientific research. – “If you don’t see how I got to the discoveries I made, you can’t replicate them and you can’t challenge them.

Many initiatives involve global scientific collaboration. Open Source Malaria, for example, seeks to develop new drugs for malaria. Hundreds of participants from around the world use the online platform it developed to share ideas and data. In 2016, this consortium published a paper on potential antimalarial compounds that had more than 50 authors from seven countries.

“It’s really encouraging when the work is done openly because you’re collaborating with people you’ve never met and with people who have amazing expertise,” says Matthew Todd, chair of the Department of New Drug Research at University College London and founder of Open Source Malaria.