The COVID‐19 pandemic points to the need for scientists to pool their efforts in order to understand this disease and respond to the ensuing crisis. Other global challenges also require such scientific cooperation. Yet in academic institutions, reward structures and incentives are based on systems that primarily fuel the competition between (groups of) scientific researchers. Competition between individual researchers, research groups, research approaches, and scientific disciplines is seen as an important selection mechanism and driver of academic excellence. These expected benefits of competition have come to define the organizational culture in academia. There are clear indications that the overreliance on competitive models undermines cooperative exchanges that might lead to higher quality insights. This damages the well‐being and productivity of individual researchers and impedes efforts towards collaborative knowledge generation. Insights from social and organizational psychology on the side effects of relying on performance targets, prioritizing the achievement of success over the avoidance of failure, and emphasizing self‐interest and efficiency, clarify implicit mechanisms that may spoil valid attempts at transformation. The analysis presented here elucidates that a broader change in the academic culture is needed to truly benefit from current attempts to create more open and collaborative practices for cumulative knowledge generation.

中文翻译：

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科学作为协作知识生成

COVID-19 大流行表明科学家需要共同努力来了解这种疾病并应对随之而来的危机。其他全球挑战也需要这种科学合作。然而，在学术机构中，奖励结构和激励措施主要是促进科学研究人员（群体）之间的竞争。研究人员个人、研究小组、研究方法和科学学科之间的竞争被视为重要的选择机制和学术卓越的驱动力。这些预期的竞争效益已经定义了学术界的组织文化。有明显迹象表明，过度依赖竞争模型会破坏合作交流，而合作交流可能会带来更高质量的见解。这损害了研究人员个人的福祉和生产力，并阻碍了协作知识生成的努力。社会和组织心理学对依赖绩效目标、优先实现成功而不是避免失败以及强调自身利益和效率的副作用的见解，澄清了可能破坏有效转型尝试的隐含机制。这里提出的分析阐明，学术文化需要进行更广泛的变革，才能真正受益于当前为累积知识生成创造更加开放和协作的实践的尝试。