Fear of being scooped (FOBS) may be limiting the potential of your science.
Here is how to get past FOBS and break out of your silos.
I have seen it countless times. Researchers hold back results, afraid to present or fearful of discussing the problems they have in their current work.
They fear being scooped. (FOBS).
They fear that their idea, or their newly identified molecule or mechanism, will be picked up by someone who will be faster and secure the high-impact publication.
If you have FOBS, you are likely to employ a particular research strategy: move quickly alone or in a small group and hope to be the first to publish.
What many do not realise is that while a FOBS-based strategy is reasonable, it is a weak research strategy.
By the end of this article, you will know how to overcome your FOBS and adopt a much stronger research strategy.
A FOBS-based strategy assumes that publishing your findings is sufficient.
It also assumes that on your own or in a small group you can do enough to publish findings and move the field forward.
Even in 1928, for one of the most, if not the most dramatic medical breakthroughs, this was not the case.
Alexander Fleming was a failed innovator.
We all know that Alexander Fleming identified penicillin accidentally.
But what most don't realise is that it took more than a decade to move penicillin into clinical practise.
Working on his own, Fleming was only able to make mould juice, and the effort to develop his findings into a new therapy stalled.
It was only when a multi-disciplinary group stumbled across Fleming’s publication 11 years later that enough purified penicillin was created to conduct the laboratory studies and then a clinical study that proved penicillin could be an effective therapy.
Just imagine if that second group of researchers had a silo mentality, or they had never come across Fleming’s publication.
The antibiotic era would likely have started much later.
One could say that Alexander Fleming, at least when it comes to penicillin, was a failed innovator.
He discovered penicillin but was unable to complete the act of innovation by bringing it to the clinic because his silo was not big enough to make it happen.
This story illustrates the limitations of working in a small silo, as researchers with FOBS tend to do.
Why do medical researchers continue to work in small silos?
FOBS is probably the biggest reason, but there are others as well:
Being unaware that multidisciplinary, multistakeholder efforts are even possible
Dread of the effort it takes to get people together – the collaboration tax.
Concern that decision-making in a group will be difficult
Institutional pressure to publish or perish.
All of these reasons are the result of a scarcity mentality.
It is as if there are a limited number of good ideas and you have stumbled across one of the only good ideas.
But this is not reality.
There are plenty of ideas and plenty of possibilities, many of which just languish. In other words, there is an abundance of ideas.
All of the reasons to close your research off in silos can equally or better addressed with an abundance mindset.
The problem with a FOBS mindset is that it limits you to techniques you have entirely within your group or well-established, non-cutting-edge techniques.
By their very nature, cutting-edge techniques require openness to other research groups.
In addition, modern technology makes an enormous amount of data and analytical techniques available which require broader and broader cross-disciplinary working.
Those who remain in their silos risk becoming obsolete.
FOBS limits the possibilities available to you for multiplying your research productivity.
The better strategy.
The alternative to a FOBS-driven strategic approach is to focus on cutting-edge techniques, capabilities and capacities, which means working widely with others.
You then apply those techniques together to various ideas.
In such a strategy, it does not matter if someone scoops you.
You will have the capability to go beyond their scooping by leveraging new techniques to develop the breakthrough findings more deeply.
Maybe they were the first to publish on a molecule, but you will, with the help of your collaborators, understand deeper mechanisms or run the clinical studies of scope and scale necessary to move the new finding into the clinic.
The thing is that scientific findings are multifaceted.
There are always multiple variations or follow-on findings, particularly in this era where all the simple mechanisms have been uncovered.
The problem is that stories where people were scooped tend to be told more often than stories where people worked together.
There is a natural bias towards the negative that drives FOBS.
We are more likely to be motivated by fear than by anything else.
If you abandon FOBS and adopt an abundance mindset:
collaborations will become easy
you will look to groups to help you make decisions, and
you will publish more than your institution cares to keep track of.
How to get over FOBS
The good news is that FOBS is a mindset, and mindsets can be shifted.
There are two levels to address: personal and collaborative.
Personal
Contemplate the difference between the words collaboration and cooperation. Understanding the difference in meaning between two words that are adjacent to each other helps us to understand where our strategy for thinking, our mindset is faulty. Collaboration implies a mutual gain; cooperation is simply alignment. When you appreciate the potential gains from collaboration as opposed to cooperation, it helps shift your mindset away from FOBS. If you really want this to be effective, take 10 minutes and write out the differences between the words and even detail examples from your experience.
Make collaboration a core value. Build a habit of collaboration. Reach out to offer your collaboration with no expectation of return at least once a week. This is easy to accomplish when you are working on a consortium project. By doing this, you will help reinforce your appreciation of the power of collaboration.
Think about the time lost to withholding what you are doing compared to what others are able to do because they are working together.
Be selective about what you intend to protect. What you may need to protect is a specific molecule or a specific finding. You likely can still collaborate on more nonspecific aspects. For example, maybe you need a better preclinical model; collaborate on that. This also goes for ideas for analyses and publications.
Patent rapidly. Once you have the patent in place, you have more freedom to collaborate on IP.
Focus on building techniques, not ideas. If you know your techniques are novel and unique, you can be confident that while someone may scoop you, you will have many opportunities in the future to be the first to publish.
Don't scoop your collaborators. Realise that in the long term, scooping your collaborators is a losing strategy. Researchers whom others are afraid to collaborate with will produce less.
FOBS is also limiting in collaboration, particularly in a multi-partner collaboration like a consortium project.
In a collaboration
Decide upon who is going to publish what a priori. When you start out on a project, you know in general what papers will come out of your work.
You may not know the results, but you know what papers you will write. Decide upon and assign authorships upfront, at least for the first and last authors. This will have the effect of relaxing the competitive environment within a consortium, and it will enable people to bring forth ideas and problems prior to having a polished result. It will also help to expand the range of ideas you intend to pursue. The principle should also be that anyone in the consortium can request to join a paper as long as they are bringing something to the effort.
We did this in the U-BIOPRED project and identified over 200 potential papers, many of which were never written but whose ideas expanded. Twelve years after the end of the funding period, the U-BIOPRED consortium is still publishing together.
Develop a culture of sharing problems. Making a priori registries of papers makes people more open, and this is part of creating a culture of sharing problems. There is extra work that has to be invested in collaboration, the collaboration tax. The return on that investment is the ability to solve problems together. By creating a culture of early problem exposure, you have the opportunity to access the thinking and experience of those in the consortium. Promote this culture by providing forums for people to share and discuss the problems they are having in their work.
Create a collaborative ethos. Microsoft famously shifted out of a fixed mindset to a growth mindset by making a growth mindset a core value. By telling stories of cases where failures led to substantial learning, culture shifted and silos began to breakdown. A similar transformation is possible by making openness a core value. Then, making sure to tell stories where working together made a huge difference.
Summary
Unchecked FOBS can limit your potential and drain all of the energy and value out of a consortium project.
It can be a substantial mindset shift to set FOBS on the side and bet on the exponential returns of openness and collaboration. It will need time and structure to make such a shift happen.
By building on these steps and doing all that you can do to leverage collaboration the last thing you will have to worry about is being scooped.
Getting past your FOBS will mean that you will have so many opportunities that you will need to get substantial funding. Start by learning how to position you medical research for substantial funding.