Scientist Collectives
It’s surprising that there aren’t more organizations governed by scientists for the sake of scientists
Scientists hate being managed, so it’s surprising that there aren’t more science collectives: organizations governed by scientists for the sake of scientists. We know of at least one science co-op – Asterisk – which is a recent experiment.
Academic departments already act as a kind of a scientist collective: all the professors are involved in the governance of the department and the position of chair rotates among professors who keep their full-time jobs. However, departments all exist within a larger university structure which severely constrains their autonomy. The steady increase in university administrators exacerbates the problem.
You could imagine a wide spectrum of collectivism/co-op structures: from full-on collective ownership and decision making among a small group to something structured like REI where there is management and a board, but the individual researchers collectively act like the shareholders who the board is supposed to represent. Maybe it’s more like a mutual-aid society, where everybody pays into a “rainy day fund.”
Some speculative reasons why there aren’t more science collectives:
Primary-investigator-and-project-based science funding makes it legally difficult to pool funding, even if researchers were willing to.
Scientists might just be like spiders and need some kind of non-scientist mediation within an organization.
Current selection pressures in scientist training heavily bias towards individual rockstars instead of people who would want to opt into more collective governance.
If you’ve tried this or are thinking about it, let us know in the comments!
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/