Coronavirus will improve scientific collaboration

The argument

The competitive landscape of scientific research, where prestige, accolades, and compensation are tied to who can publish important findings first, incentivizes scientists to conceal their work from rival groups until the last possible minute. This culture of secrecy has led to inefficiencies in past attempts to collaborate on urgent crises such as disease outbreaks, but the magnitude of the problem presented by COVID-19 is changing that. Scientists studying the coronavirus are making unprecedented use of collaborative tools including preprint servers, where new results can be made available before final publication in peer-reviewed journals. In February 2020, virologist Isabella Eckerle of the Geneva Centre for Emerging Viral Diseases remarked that the collaborative effort tackling COVID-19 "feels like things are transitioning to a completely new culture of doing research," while epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health said that "intense communication has catalyzed an unusual level of collaboration among scientists that, combined with scientific advances, has enabled research to move faster than during any previous outbreak."

Premises

Counter-arguments

The evidence offered is contemporaneous testimony from February 2020 about how the moment felt to two researchers, deployed in support of a claim about the future. Neither quotation could speak to whether the change would outlast the emergency, because both were given at its beginning; and the argument's own diagnosis explains why scepticism is warranted. It identifies the obstacle as an incentive structure — prestige, appointments and pay tied to publishing first — and then describes a period in which that structure was temporarily overwhelmed by an emergency. Nothing in the account alters the incentives, so nothing in it explains why the behaviour would persist once the emergency passed. The same period supplied strong counter-evidence at precisely the point where the stakes were highest. Vaccine development proceeded under commercial confidentiality, protected by patents and supply contracts; manufacturing know-how was not shared even with capable producers elsewhere; and proposals to waive intellectual-property protections were negotiated over for years before producing a narrow and largely unused outcome. Openness held in the parts of the effort that generated papers, and did not hold in the parts that generated products. The preprint surge also carried costs the argument does not weigh. Unreviewed findings moved rapidly into policy debate and news coverage, and several prominent examples were retracted or debunked only after shaping decisions — which is an argument for review as much as against it. 'Faster' and 'better' are being treated as the same property. Finally, the durability claim is now partly testable. Preprint volumes in many fields rose sharply and then levelled off, and the competitive structure of academic hiring and grant-making is intact. The lesson may have been learned; the incentives that suppress it were never addressed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The incentive structure identified as the obstacle — prestige and compensation tied to publishing first — was not altered by the pandemic, so the premise describes a temporary suspension under emergency conditions rather than a change to the mechanism that produces secrecy. [Rejecting P2] The evidence is contemporaneous testimony from early 2020 offered in support of a claim about the future, and the same period supplied counter-evidence where the stakes were highest: vaccine development under commercial confidentiality, manufacturing know-how unshared, and intellectual-property waivers resisted for years. Rapid preprint circulation also carried costs, with unreviewed work reaching policy and media before retraction.