tigressse

After couple of years analyzing the world of researchers (and one* in particular), exchanging point of views with friends , it seems like researchers** are paranoid, they don’t WANT to share their knowledge - even those fell into common knowledge heritage - due to an extreme (beyond understanding!?) fear of being scooped***?! And definitively a strong jealousy of being surpassed by colleagues (local or worldwide).

Here are my conclusion: They don’t want to collaborate, they will never collaborate. The actual intrinsic structure don’t allow that. So, stop dreaming about web 2.0 features to make that working. There is no miracle, if someone don’t share offline what is the reason he should do so online?

I am probably wrong! If so, do you want to share some real experiences of research 2.0? The debate is open…

Engineers / scientists build on others works!

* the word “community” will not be appropriate, “research lab” is suitable.

** Of course some exceptions may exists: the computer sciences area (thanks to the open-source spirit) and life science (well, generally they share database; it’s a start, it’s ok).

*** Really like the examples by scenarios probabilities from OpenWetWare about getting scooped

Early this week, a joint research has been announced between Kaneka Corporation, a Japanese manufacturer of thin-film silicon hybrid solar cells, and IMEC, a Belgian center in nanotechnology and nanoelectronics.

The goal of this collaboration: new industrial a-Si:H* hetero-junction solar cells with the world’s highest level conversion efficiency of beyond 20%.

Kaneka invest about 1.5 billion Yen in the project. 10 researchers of both side will be working during 3 years in the solar cells division in IMEC facilities, located in Leuven.

It’s kind of project that could excite more than one in the domain!

* Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon