According to a recently released report by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Center for the History of Physics, the documentation of collaborative scientific research needs urgent attention. The problems that need to be addressed range from the way in which the contributions of distinguished individuals (or records of a project conducted by one institution) are preserved, to the fact that, almost without exception, research institutions and federal science agencies fail to provide adequate support to programmes to save records of significant research.
To remedy this, the AIP History Center has issued Documenting Multi-Institutional Collaborations – the final report of its decade-long study of multi-institutional collaborations in physics and allied fields.
The main recommendations of the report are that:
* scientists and others should take special care to identify past collaborations that have made significant contributions;
* research laboratories and other centres should set up a mechanism to secure records of future significant experiments;
* institutional archives should share information.
The report makes a broad distinction between “core records” – to be saved for all collaborations – and other records to be saved for “significant collaborations”.
