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

The real challenge is to develop new business models that can exploit the capacities of the internet in new ways, and to start to shed or migrate away from the old business models of the 20th century.

The Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) is a software toolkit to establish web-based virtual team organizations for researchers in biomedicine. It enables researchers to publish and discuss on-line content such as articles, news, and perspectives, and to provide shared semantic context for this content using established scientific vocabularies and automated text mining.

So how do you deal with competitors, people who want you to fail, in an open, transparent, and collaborative system