The benefits of community participation or collaboration should outweigh the costs to support a rational decision to pursue such routes. Lions usually prefer to hunt as a group as the shared food from group kills offers a better return and lower risk than hunting alone; in a similar manner organisations may also choose to collaborate to have greater success in acquiring new resources or income. The current convergence of a number of factors appears to be driving up the R&D collaboration benefit/cost ratio. The drivers include: 1. Scientific research is becoming more complex and multi-disciplinary, requiring researchers to move more away from “working in the expert’s box”. 2. Our work, economy and society are becoming more knowledge-oriented. (I define knowledge here as including understanding gained from experience and involves individual and collective knowledge in addition to explicit knowledge such as intellectual property (IP).) 3. Business models in the chemistry and pharmaceutical industry that worked fine historically, e.g., manufacturing products based predominantly on patents related to chemistry, appear to be increasingly lacking. 4. The goals of translational and personalized medicine have stronger requirements for networked and collaborative approaches over discipline and time than the historically relatively linear drug discovery and development process. Integrated services offer greater future value creation than stand-alone products. 5. Patient Safety has become an issue of growing concern requiring new more integrative approaches to data, knowledge and disciplines. 6. Computational Science continues to grow in importance, fueling overlaps and interactions between scientific disciplines including that of computer science. 7. The maturing of the Internet-based World Wide Web including enhanced usability, services, social software and the semantic web, provide new community and collaboration resource opportunities. 8. Challenging problems we face as a

Sharing data is good. But sharing your own data? That can get complicated. As two research communities who held meetings in May on the issue report their proposals to promote data sharing in biology, a special issue of Nature examines the cultural and technical hurdles that can get in the way of good intentions.

In this hands-on learning programme a team from Murdoch Library helps you explore free online tools that can be used for teaching, learning, research and managing daily work. It runs from 23 June to 28 July 2009. Each Friday information about two or three Things , plus exercises about each will appear on this blog. You can complete all of this from home, or if you booked in you can attend workshops offered by the library.

An "Aha!" moment or event indicates a change in the cognitive state. I first heard about this concept from Frank Ohl and Henning Scheich, former colleagues, but recently also found it in the Wall Street Journal: A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight, which serves as a better introduction. These moments need an environment in which they can flourish. As far as my moments are concerned, they come—surprisingly—reliably but only if I write about my work with the reader in mind. Most of my articles changed quite dramatically in the process of writing, although I used to start writing, only when I thought the creative work is seemingly finished. I learned nothing could be more wrong. So for me being engaged in making my work more transparent by writing about it at an earlier stage, while it is still in progress, is nothing less than forcing insight.