Introduction: Cooperation and Competition in the Sciences

摘要

Third party funding, publications in pertinent journals, top spots in rankings or excellent PhD students: these are some of the rewards for which scientists and scientific institutions strive and compete. Often, the dynamics of modern science—which we understand in this introduction in the broad sense of the German term Wissenschaft—are reduced to an all-out competition. This view, however, tends to conceal the fact that scholars are in numerous ways part of cooperative structures. More often than not, they pursue their research goals as part of a larger group, share their insights and results with colleagues, and exchange ideas at conferences. Without cooperation, Wissenschaft would be unthinkable, be it the deciphering of the human genome, the proof of existence of the Higgs-Boson or the edition of ancient Latin inscriptions, such as the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.