Progress of science is greatly enhanced when scientists collaborate intensively. The public at large believes so. To them the scientific community is one great society of people that are nice to each other, that are willing to help each other and are willing to share their insights. Collaborations will speed up the time it takes for the world to get at the Truth.

Forcing scientific collaborations upon scientists is one way for politicians, science policy makers and science managers to manipulate scientists. In their eyes the self-serving of prima-donna scientists leads to a waste of tax-payers money. It is the big ego of scientists that sits in the way of scientific progress. 

Look at the all the programs of the European Union or of Nato. In these bureaucratic institutions scientific collaborations are goals in themselves. The more partners you find in more different countries the higher your chances are of getting their support.

If you fall in this bureaucratic trap and take all these collaboration requests seriously you will end up spending your scientific life in restaurants all over Europe negotiating with local operators who have given up doing science a long time ago.

So are we scientists just plain bastards that rather hamper a scientific discovery than help one of our colleague getting the honor? In my opinion scientists are very efficient and are much better in spending tax-payers money in a responsible way than if they would follow blindly the directives of our governments. In some areas of science collaborations are absolutely crucial. For instance because of the large scale of the effort. Like CERN, for high-energy physics, an organization that invented the concept of international collaboration before our present-day politicians were born. They invented the world-wide-web just for this purpose. In other areas of science, like molecular biology, scientists need to share their data sets to be able to distill something significant out of them. My viewpoint is that if scientists feel that a collaboration will help them they will look for partners. If they do not think that they will profit from such a cooperation, but would get a lot of extra money if they would do it, they are willing to play the game and waste tax-payers money.

Small Science
In contrast to shared international scientific facilities we find at the other extreme of the spectrum the small-science activities of one professor with one or two PhD students doing very original, sublime work. Why should such a principal investigator be forced to collaborate?

Difficulties when working together with other group leaders
In my field I know personally forty to fifty group leaders that work on subjects related to my field. Our group has collaborations with only two or three of them. Am I such a difficult guy? Are they such nasty persons? Or both? Or neither is true?

In many cases there is not much to gain, but rather  much to loose, in starting a joint effort. Different groups have different cultures. Different countries have different social and financial structures. Collaboration comes with a large overhead. Of managing the collaboration. Managing the different cultures. In one group the big professor is the boss and has to sign every order of one liter of liquid nitrogen. In another participating group the principal investigator has decided to become a politician. In again another group organization is close to anarchy. How do you write a paper together? Can the young PhD student from England correct the big German professor? Is the Italian group leader of Catania going to be the last author? Or is the whole collaboration ruined by some Dutch control-freak? Participating group leaders with incompatible personalities should not be forced to do something together.

European disease
I have the impression that the wish to collaborate is more or less a European disease. I do not know what is worse, the European disease, or the American disease where each junior is fighting for tenure, and avoids collaborations as the plague, as they could spoil his image of a capable, independent researcher.

The Future
Anyway, I like to work with other senior scientists, but I find it very difficult to do so in practice. But maybe you think scientific collaborations with wikis, blogs, web 2.0 etc. will make an end to the individual contributions in small science as well.

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