Hi! Miko here from Asterisk labs - it's lovely to see our co-op being used as an example. Our experiment is definitely still in progress, and so far it's given us a decent degree of confidence that a scientific co-op like ours can be financially sustainable while providing excellent working conditions.
What hasn't yet been tested fully is how the governance dynamics play out when more people join our team (interdisciplinary expansion is something we are currently working on). So far, managing asterisk has been rather smooth with only 3 partner scientists in the team.
Regarding the speculative reasons:
* "Primary-investigator-and-project-based science funding makes it legally difficult to pool funding, even if researchers were willing to." - this is quite true and we haven't yet tried to pool several funding sources yet. Our current strategy is to build an interdisciplinary, yet versatile team where we can have -most- members being able to contribute to -most- projects. It's true that this might in some way be at odds with the interdisciplinary goal we have set for our lab.
* "Scientists might just be like spiders and need some kind of non-scientist mediation within an organization." - this is true and in many ways, working structures like asterisk will only work for -some- scientists profiles.
* "Current selection pressures in scientist training heavily bias towards individual rockstars instead of people who would want to opt into more collective governance." - I believe that working structures like asterisk can still support existence of rockstar members (in fact, I hope that all or most of our scientists who are interested in building their individual profile can do it at asterisk) - however, it is true they would be building a very different portfolio compared to someone who is optimising to become a head of a renowned academic lab.
Arika and I were also doing a descriptive project on ISIs (literature review and survey). That's kind of stalled, but one thing we did produce was the following list of ISIs that seemed to be active as of mid-2024:
There are actually quite a few ISIs, and they have really diverse traits compared to the standard university department - ranging from small organizations that are basically set up for PIs to apply for funding outside of universities, to larger organizations that provide affiliation for publications, but don't have a strong expectation that members will receive funding. We felt that there was some bias towards ISIs focused on researchers working on history and the humanities, but that there was a growing number focused on supporting scientific work (although this is usually computer-based analysis, very few had lab facilities). Happy to discuss our work on this further if you are interested!
Thank you for the post. I want to add time to this conversation. Academic PI's (at least in the US) are already doing more than one job with teaching, researching, and service. Let alone managing a lab and people. How does time play into this idea?
Hi! Miko here from Asterisk labs - it's lovely to see our co-op being used as an example. Our experiment is definitely still in progress, and so far it's given us a decent degree of confidence that a scientific co-op like ours can be financially sustainable while providing excellent working conditions.
What hasn't yet been tested fully is how the governance dynamics play out when more people join our team (interdisciplinary expansion is something we are currently working on). So far, managing asterisk has been rather smooth with only 3 partner scientists in the team.
Regarding the speculative reasons:
* "Primary-investigator-and-project-based science funding makes it legally difficult to pool funding, even if researchers were willing to." - this is quite true and we haven't yet tried to pool several funding sources yet. Our current strategy is to build an interdisciplinary, yet versatile team where we can have -most- members being able to contribute to -most- projects. It's true that this might in some way be at odds with the interdisciplinary goal we have set for our lab.
* "Scientists might just be like spiders and need some kind of non-scientist mediation within an organization." - this is true and in many ways, working structures like asterisk will only work for -some- scientists profiles.
* "Current selection pressures in scientist training heavily bias towards individual rockstars instead of people who would want to opt into more collective governance." - I believe that working structures like asterisk can still support existence of rockstar members (in fact, I hope that all or most of our scientists who are interested in building their individual profile can do it at asterisk) - however, it is true they would be building a very different portfolio compared to someone who is optimising to become a head of a renowned academic lab.
Also, I just found this relevant reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/cooperatives/comments/1ixy1fp/do_you_know_of_any_researchcooperatives/ and it may be worthwhile to specifically shout out our friends at DATLAS: https://www.datlas.fr/about/
Scientist Collectives sounds a lot like Independent Scholarship Institutes (ISIs). My colleague Arika wrote about them here: https://ifp.org/broadening-the-knowledge-economy-through-independent-scholarship/
Arika and I were also doing a descriptive project on ISIs (literature review and survey). That's kind of stalled, but one thing we did produce was the following list of ISIs that seemed to be active as of mid-2024:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-124Xvb2zjh98HwLRzDkDhwG9Zl-6d0sAg_zTb_siLM/edit?usp=sharing
There are actually quite a few ISIs, and they have really diverse traits compared to the standard university department - ranging from small organizations that are basically set up for PIs to apply for funding outside of universities, to larger organizations that provide affiliation for publications, but don't have a strong expectation that members will receive funding. We felt that there was some bias towards ISIs focused on researchers working on history and the humanities, but that there was a growing number focused on supporting scientific work (although this is usually computer-based analysis, very few had lab facilities). Happy to discuss our work on this further if you are interested!
Thank you for the post. I want to add time to this conversation. Academic PI's (at least in the US) are already doing more than one job with teaching, researching, and service. Let alone managing a lab and people. How does time play into this idea?