Royal Society: Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century

The Royal Society has released Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century. The report is in 3 parts and excerpts are as follows:

Knowledge, Networks and Nations reviews, based on available data, the changing patterns of science, and scientific collaboration, in order to provide a basis for understanding such ongoing changes. It aims to identify the opportunities and benefits of international collaboration, to consider how they can best be realised, and to initiate a debate on how international scientific collaboration can be harnessed to tackle global problems more effectively.

Part 1 maps and investigates where and how science is being carried out around the world and the ways in which this picture is changing. Important points of discussion of Part 1 are:

• Science in 2011 is increasingly global
• Traditional ‘scientific superpowers’ (USA, Western Europe, Japan)still lead the field. 
• The emergence of new players and leaders point towards an increasingly multipolar scientific world
• Science is also flourishing economic development and addressing local and global issues of sustainability.

Part 2 reveals the shifting patterns of international collaboration:

• The scientific world is becoming increasingly interconnected, with international collaboration on the rise.
• Collaboration is growing for a variety of reasons as collaboration enhances the quality of scientific research and improves the efficiency and effectiveness of that research as the scale of both budgets and research challenges grow.
• The primary driver of most collaboration is the scientists themselves.
• The connections of people, through formal and informal channels, diaspora communities, virtual global networks and professional communities of shared interests are important drivers of international collaboration.
• Collaboration brings significant benefits, both measurable (such as increased citation impact
  and access to new markets), and less easily quantifiable outputs, such as broadening research
  horizons.

Part 3 explores the role of international scientific collaboration in addressing some of the most pressing global challenges of our time.

• The global scientific community is increasingly charged with or driven by the need to find solutions to a range of issues that threaten sustainability. These ‘global challenges’ have received much attention in recent years, and are now a key component of national and multinational science strategies and many
  funding mechanisms.
• Global challenges are interdependent and interrelated.
• Valuable lessons can be drawn from existing models in designing, participating in and benefiting from global challenge research.
• Science is essential for addressing global challenges, but it cannot do so in isolation.
• All countries have a role in the global effort to tackle these challenges.

The major recommendations are as follows:

1. Support for international science should be maintained and strengthened.
2. Internationally collaborative science should be encouraged, supported and facilitated.
3. National and international strategies for science are required to address global challenges.
4. International capacity building is crucial to ensure that the impacts of scientific research are shared globally.
5. Better indicators are required in order to properly evaluate global science.