Original subtitles

Welcome back to #SeeTheFuture 2021.

I'm Darrel Gunter and it's my pleasure to

introduce you to our next keynote speaker.

Earlier, our keynote speaker, Randy Schekman[ph], described the importance

of collaboration and openness in basic science and research publication.

Our next session is going to delve further by addressing the topic of the

future for international research collaboration in the post-COVID era.

The speaker for this session is Richard de Grijs, professor in the

Department of Physics and Astronomy at Macquarie University, Australia.

Richard is an acclaimed academic and journal editor with

more than 25 years' experience in the physical sciences.

In March 2018, he joined Macquarie University as

Associate Dean of global engagement between 2006 and 2008.

Richard served as a scientific editor at the Astrophysical Journal,

and later as deputy editor of the Astrophysical Journal letters.

He has received numerous awards from such prestigious

organ izations as the Australian Academy of Science,

and from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Richard was the founding director of the

East Asian office of astronomy for development.

His current senior appointment include roles as a senior adviser

to the Australian Government on the Australia Awards in Indonesia.

As a member of the advisory board of the Australia

China Consortium for astrophysical research,

and as president of a division of the International Astronomical Union.

Please use the chat box to reach out to other

delegates and to the conference organizers.

Don't forget that if you have any questions for

Richard, please post them in the Q&A box on this page.

All responses will be published and see the

future conference report after the conference.

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, here is Professor Richard de Grijs.

Professor!

Good day, everyone.

I would like to thank Enago for their

invitation to speak at this conference today.

It is customary that speakers from Australia acknowledged the

traditional custodians of the lands from which they are speaking.

Prior to the arrival of the first British settlers in 1788,

this continent was covered by some 500

nations of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders.

I therefore pay my respects to the elders, past and presence,

of the Bongo clan of the Eora nation on whose land I am based.

I also welcome indigenous attendees from

anywhere in the world to this presentation.

International research collaboration in a post-pandemic worlds

will become even more important than it was prior to the pandemic.

If you look at the graph on the left of the screen,

we see that over the past two decades, international research

collaboration has increased by almost a factor of two,

that is shown by the red line at the top where we see the

proportion of papers co-authored by international co-authors.

The blue line at the bottom shows up collaborations with three

or more countries more than doubles during the same time periods.

And so, in the words of Magdalena Skipper, Editor in Chief of

Nature, science lies at the heart of solutions to important problems.

And at the moment of course, there is no problem more important than

solving the coronavirus pandemic so that we can go back to our normal life.

International collaboration during the pandemic was curtailed

to some extent by travel restrictions and border closures.

But our newly digitized worlds has given rise to an increase

of an acceleration of international research collaboration.

Because we needed to combine the efforts

of scientists working in a wide variety of fields,

from basic virus biology to help us understand the problem,

to rapid epidemiological data sharing so that

we understood how fast the virus was transmitted.

And the transmissibility of the

Coronavirus, particularly the early viruses,

is anywhere between influenza, the flu and measles,

the Delta variant might actually transmit more quickly.

Once we understood that, other teams of scientists worked

on genome sequencing at scale and at very rapid pace,

results of which they make public almost

immediately to the rest of the scientific community,

so that we understood that we were actually dealing with the Coronavirus.

And once that was understood, lots of teams of scientists

all over the world worked on vaccine development.

And so now we have a number of viable vaccines that were developed in

rapid time, an order of magnitude faster than prior to the pandemic.

So, international collaboration has been

very important in tackling the current crisis.

In the words of Gabriel Leung, Dean of Medicine of Hong Kong University,

everyone who has some expertise has

dropped everything to work on solving the problem,

and everybody here means molecular biologists, epidemiologists,

clinicians, social scientists, engineers, material scientists,

and a whole slew of other professions.

So, in essence, we needed interdisciplinarity.

And really what we needed was a step change in interdisciplinary approaches.

From pathogen identification which requires expertise

in epidemiology and virology to virus screening,

which requires imaging and genetic expertise to vaccine development,

where biomedicine and molecular biology

played important roles to diagnosis and therapeutics,

of course, led by clinical medicine and pharmacology.

But if you look forward to the next, let's say decade or so,

Coronavirus is not the only global risk that we are dealing with.

From the World Economic Forum's global risks report 2021,

you can see here at the top of the screen what the most likely

global risks are going forward from 2021, also in the last few years.

And at the bottom of the screen, they're ranked by

impact and you can see there is a lot of green here.

And all of that green relates to environmental factors to some extent,

extreme weather, climate action, failure, human

environmental damage, biodiversity loss, etc.

And of course, in the last few years, infectious

diseases, the Coronavirus have also come to the fore.

All of these future crisis require mitigation, and for that mitigation

to be successful, interdisciplinary approaches are essential,

pressing global challenges from the climate emergency to

biodiversity loss from food security to future global health,

from education to justice and poverty alleviation will all require

cross discipline and cross sector approaches on a global scale.

The world needs solutions to pressing global challenges

if we are to prosper in a post-pandemic future.

And this was very well voiced by the UK science minister Amanda Solloway recently,

who said this pandemic is demonstrated the urgent

need to work together to tackle common challenges.

From genomic sequencing to vaccines,

our scientists and researchers have achieved far more working

across borders than they would have been able to do alone.

Now of course, there are a lot of challenges associated with

international collaboration, but there are many opportunities as well.

So, let us consider some of the challenges and opportunities.

First, of course, practical impediments imply that scientists have

not been able to travel as much as they used to prior to the pandemic.

Border closures prevent early career

researchers from building up face to face networks,

and that might be devastating to some extent

later on in their career, so they need to catch up.

Border closures and travel restrictions have interrupted fieldwork, which

might have led to gaps in long term data sets, longitudinal data sets,

or even the loss of entire experiments or research programs.

Again, early career researchers have lacked opportunities,

to gain the skills and experience they need to

become the future experts the world will depend on.

And then of course, from a policy perspective, a long time before the

pandemic hit, we already saw trends and tendencies towards isolationism.

In the past few years, the worsening geopolitical tensions

between, for instance, the United States and China,

have only contributed to further isolationism in some sectors.

Numerous countries have passed foreign interference legislation, the

United States being one of them, but the UK and Australia as well.

And again, that might stifle international collaborations.

Brexit hasn't helped the UK.

Many British scientists have been excluded from European collaborations,

simply because of Brexit and the

uncertainty surrounding funding of their projects.

And similarly, Swiss nationals or Swiss scientists based at Swiss

institutions have been excluded from horizon 2020 European Union programs,

because the Swiss government and the European Union are at

loggerheads in terms of negotiating a new Association agreements.

So, these are major challenges, but we can overcome them if we work together.

There are many opportunities as well, perhaps

opportunities you may not have considered.

Given that everything these days is online, we use zoom, we use

Google Meet, we use a whole variety of digital means of communication,

rebalancing of the north-south imbalance to lateral virtual,

collaboration is possible now at any stage of a research project.

Gone are hopefully the days of helicopter science, when northern or

Western scientists would parachute into southern research environments,

do their research and disappear again, without

hardly any collaboration with Southern scientists.

There are numerous opportunities now for the

global south, including south-south collaborations.

Digital means of collaboration provide us with additional transparency,

visibility and representation of everyone involved

at any stage of a project, a major opportunity.

Remote participation and also opportunities

for education are now coming within reach,

to those for whom it would otherwise have been prohibitively

expensive in terms of travel expenses, accommodation and the like.

And some countries even have seen positive brain gains of diaspora scientists

returning from western and northern countries home to the global south.

And so there are some unexpected advantages of the current situation.

If we now look at international collaboration over the last year or so,

this graph on the left shows you the number of international

collaborators on COVID-19-related papers during the year of 2020,

from January through to December.

And you can see that if you look at the orange line, initially,

international collaboration on COVID-19 papers was a lot higher,

in terms of the fractional contribution of

international teams than for standard science.

But that, of course, tapered off after a while.

Interestingly, if we look at the smaller graph on the right, during the pandemic,

scientists from China were involved almost

twice as frequently on Coronavirus papers,

particularly in the early days than they were prior to the pandemic.

And this is of course, due to the fact that the COVID-19

Coronavirus was first reported in China in late 2019.

Now, this is all good and well, and I am a huge

proponent of international research collaboration,

but international research collaboration, for that to be effective and

efficient, we need to provide global data access to everyone involved.

And that is a challenge.

We already talked about the threat of isolationism,

so the long term retreat for multilateralism.

In a number of cases, the free exchange of

information is curtailed or has been threatened.

Just as a case in point, in the last week, the Singapore government passed

foreign interference law that some scientists are very worried about,

because it might restrain them from openly discussing

genuine academic research with their overseas collaborators.

One has to be very careful about the ethics of responsible

data sharing, not just among academics, but also with industry,

and how does industry then handle sensitive data.

Issues of data privacy, data security, and of course, national

security may be of concern and they have to be very carefully managed.

In this day and age that we have to share a lot of our data in

order to allow contact traces to know where we are and what we do,

prevention of data exploitation by either government or private

enterprises is a significant issue that many of us worry about.

But it is key that international collaboration and global education

building must be based on transparent and trustful relations.

And that is what we have to work on.

Work between people established up trust so we can take

the next step and collaborate efficiently and effectively.

Threats to that approach come from threats to academic

freedom, self-censorship, and threats to integrity.

Again, in addition to the challenges, there are numerous opportunities as well.

Sharing global data access offers significant benefits to publicly

and privately funded research, particularly if it's free or low cost.

Open lines of research and relationships facilitate world class

research outcomes, we see that in my field of astrophysics.

Digitizing societies, leading in turn to wealth generation based on

public-private trust relationships is perhaps the next step forward,

we really have to go beyond the academic ivory tower

and involve our private enterprises in our work,

and providing global data access allows citizen science and

citizen based digital research to take off at unprecedented scales.

So, there are lots of opportunities here as well.

And this is voiced very well by some of the

global research and private enterprise leaders.

And I have two quotes here, one from Jean-Pierre

Bourguignon, President of the European Research Council,

who states that science needs an open world to thrive and the senior

Vice President of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, Lene Oddershede,

says we need a global code of conduct for data sharing.

So, businesses as well as research funders are on the same page.

The next thing we need to do is really take that next step and work together.

But in order to work together, some funding is required, and

particularly the sustainability of our finances is required.

At present, many governments have poured in lots of

money into their economies to keep their economies going.

Government spending packages have been quite generous in some cases.

But what makes, at some points once the pandemic

tapers off, those spending packages will decline.

And if we look at the graph on the right, this is research and development

expenditure from 1996 to 2018, as a percentage of gross domestic products,

you can see that the high-income countries,

mostly the global north, in red and dark,

the bold red line shows you that the average of those countries

only spends about 1% of GDP on research and development expenditure.

And low and middle income countries spent even less.

Now, in this world facing multiple global challenges, is that sufficient?

Or do we need to lobby the governments for more research

funding and work more closely with our business partners?

Some new funding has been made available for science.

And during the current pandemic, but most of these were targeted investments,

specifically aimed at achieving certain goals to help defeat the Coronavirus.

We need to be very careful to not just go only for mission-driven

tendencies but curiosity-based research is just as important.

And COVID-19 needed both approaches actually, because

otherwise, you get an imbalanced science portfolio.

And that is not good for your economy either.

Collaborative innovation needs infrastructure and capacity

building across disciplinary, academic and national boundaries.

We really need to reduce barriers to international

scientific collaboration, and not go for isolations.

Now, in terms of speaking from the academic world,

if we look at the bar graph at the bottom right here,

it turns out that if you publish papers with authors from multiple countries,

you have an advantage compared to those people who come from a single institution.

This graph shows you the normalized citation impact.

One is the world average for papers with

only authors from a single institution at the top,

and with authors from more than four countries at the bottom,

and you can see a market increase here of citations for papers

that were co-authored by people from multiple countries.

Scientific publishing is currently in an accelerated states, peer review

can be done in near real time, thanks to preprint servers and social media.

Researchers need to develop new skills, they need to become

effective communicators beyond their primary discipline.

And in turn, that might be good in working with governments and businesses,

who are often focused on broader subject areas than

just a niche area on which the researcher focuses.

Science communication skills must therefore be nurtured, valued and

encouraged at any given stage of someone's education or research career.

There is a real need for an ongoing dialogue

among scientists, global leaders and policymakers.

And we really need to look beyond academia,

we need to go for a whole of society approach.

Effective scientific collaboration

transcends traditional discipline boundaries.

And this here, I refer back to our earlier discussion of interdisciplinarity,

where we have to work with scientist and practitioners from many,

many different fields in order to make that step change progress.

The education system needs to actively

encourage collaboration between disciplines,

as well as between science and industry,

business, media, citizens and governance bodies.

At this point, we work too much in our silos, academics with

academics, industry with industry, very little cross collaboration.

But there is that opportunity.

At my own institution of Macquarie

University, I moved here about four years ago.

And I found out even though we have departments and

schools that are focused on discipline boundaries,

those boundaries are very low, it's very

easy to talk to colleagues from other disciplines.

And to my surprise, that has led to quite a wide variety of

interdisciplinary projects within the university ecosystem.

So, that's all very, very positive.

And so I'm actually very pleased

that this is a possibility at my institution.

Academia, the private sector, policymakers and civil society,

must therefore collaborate in an equitable and inclusive

way to co-design future solutions and interventions.

We should go beyond the academic ivory tower once again.

In turn, this would offer a unique opportunity

for the business and financial sectors,

to support and consider collaboration as a

guiding principle when considering investments.

Business or financial sectors don't have to collaborate,

but they should consider it as an important assessment criteria

in order to decide whether or not to lend their support.

Finally, I would like to close with the views of some of the

industry leaders on global international research collaboration.

The Vice President of Johnson and Johnson,

the pharmaceutical company, Seema Kumar said,

"Science needs to capitalize on a moment of great opportunity and momentum."

Of course, she is referring here to the high respect in which experts

and Coronavirus researchers are being held today across the world.

But recent paper in Nature, the authors wrote,

"The most important ingredient in making collaborations work is commitment,

commitment to producing research that is relevant

and to understanding many angles and perspectives."

So, to close, I would like to leave you with my conclusion.

International collaboration in science, technology and

innovation offers significant and increasing potential,

to yield important advantages in terms of

scientific, economic, health, national security,

educational, societal, and diplomacy benefits and developments.

Thank you very much for your attention.

And for those of you who would like to know more,

I've got a slide here that shows you the literature that you could

consult to get some more ideas about international research collaboration.

Thanks for your attention.

On behalf of the Enago, #SeeTheFuture team, we want to thank

Professor Richard de Grijs for that excellent presentation.

Please be sure to come back for the next session of #SeeTheFuture.

Please be sure to post your questions in the Q&A box and note that

the responses will be published in the official conference report.

Also take some time to visit our sponsors and exhibitors at their booth.

I'm Darell Gunter, your host, and look forward to seeing you at the next session.