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Published online 20 February 2008 | Nature 451, 872-873 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451872a
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An indifference to boundaries
As some of the world's largest universities undergo dramatic departmental restructuring to foster interdisciplinary research, John Whitfield asks whether they're making the right move.
Immunologists at Imperial College London have been tripping over a sticky problem: the structures of the molecules they are working on. The obvious go-to team is the institute's strong corps of structural biologists.
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One way to truly implement interdisciplinary research in a University setting (as compared to boutique institutes)is to ensure that new faculty have their primary appointment in the interdisciplinary academic unit with joint appointments in the disciplines, not (as is usual) the other way around. In American academe this revolutionary step was taken in 1985 when the first Center for Complex Systems in the country was founded at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton with J A Scott Kelso as Director and Hermann Haken as co-Director. At the time, such a step would have been impossible at a major research university and still may be.
Interdisciplinary work is fine. I’ve been doing it all my life. When I have a mathematical problem that is beyond my ability, I find a mathematician. It’s easy. You just talk. It makes very little difference whether the person is in the same department, the same university or the same country. Lumping together large numbers of people in a mega-department does nothing to achieve this. They are no more likely to talk to each other than they were before. What you get by doing that is a more hierarchical structure, in which teaching becomes very secondary, and in which neither staff nor students feel they have a home. The odds of finding the person you need is still tiny; they may be anywhere in the world. There are several things that stop people talking and collaborating. One is intense pressure to publish: the target and audit culture. Instructions to submit papers for the RAE that have not got other authors from the same institution is a direct disincentive to collaboration. Another is fear of showing ignorance. And simple lack of communal eating places could well be the most important disincentive of all to learning from other disciplines. Whitfield makes all these points in his article. I have made them myself frequently. But when reorganisation is put into the hands of non-scientists, ex-scientists and HR people, the changes that are made are often quite counterproductive. The Lab for Molecular Biology is, as here, often cited as a model. Yet all one sees is changes that are precisely the opposite of what Max Perutz advocated. Fewer communal areas, unwieldy size, more hierarchical structures and silly bean-counting methods of assessment. Good scientists don’t like being treated like this. Eventually they will vote with their feet.
The article notes that journal publishing models "make it hard for researchers to be interdisciplinary" and as one of the quoted researchers comments "a physicist could, say, publish a paper on stock-market patterns in Physical Review E, but how many economists will read it is another matter." It is surprising, then, that the article makes no mention of how this problem might be addressed. Breaking down barriers between disciplines has long been seen as one of the key benefits of open access journals. If a physicists publishes a paper on stock-market patterns in an open access physics journal there is every chance, thanks to the magic of Google, that an economist may find it, read it and cite it. Open access journals such as Malaria Journal (www.malariajournal.com) are able to span multiple disciplines (from public health and bed nets, to basic parasite biology) confident in the knowledge that researchers in each of these areas will have access to all the content in the journal. With the spread of open access policies from biomedical funders, Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences setting a trend for institutional open access policies, and the SCOAP3 consortium (www.scoap3.org) pushing for open access to all high energy physics, different scientific disciplines may not have to remain strangers for much longer.