Avi Gold­farb presen­ted a fast, con­cise and effect­ive dis­cus­sion of what con­clu­sions could be drawn about multi-institutional goldfarb.gifcol­lab­or­a­tion between US uni­ver­sit­ies dur­ing the era of Bit­NET adop­tion, 1981 — 1990. A bit of inter­net his­tory, my ears perked up imme­di­ately. His more gen­eral fram­ing ques­tion: How do changes in col­la­bour­a­tion cost change how we pro­duce know­ledge.
His study examined 270 insti­tu­tions as they con­nec­ted to the BiT­NET dur­ing this period and cross-indexed this with the num­ber of coau­thored journal art­icles sub­sequently pro­duced. Goldfarb’s paper ‘Restruc­tur­ing Research: Com­mu­nic­a­tion Costs and the Demo­crat­iz­a­tion of Uni­ver­sity Innov­a­tion’ con­cludes that col­lab­or­a­tion was enhanced, but that the gain to insti­tu­tions was not uni­formly real­ized and phys­ical dis­tance between col­la­bour­at­ors remained a factor.Goldfarb’s approach top answer­ing these ques­tions was simple: com­pare pair-quaility of the research col­la­bour­a­tions to determ­ine whether BiT­net encour­aged or improved lat­eral col­la­bour­a­tion (between 1st Tier schools) or whether it enabled ver­tical col­la­bour­a­tion between first tier and lesser schools. In other words, did tech­no­logy adop­tion allow allow lesser schools a way into the sys­tem.
Goldfarb’s study demon­strated that there was a 40% increase in col­la­bour­at­ive pub­lish­ing amongst first tier schools (those receiv­ing the most NSF prior to this period). How­ever, amongst middle tier schools, the increase was more than 130%, thus sug­gest­ing that the bene­fits to pub­lish­ing were dis­pro­por­tion­ately real­ized. The study sys­tem­at­ic­ally explored pub­lic­a­tion data and found that the num­ber of pub­lic­a­tions remained con­stant, but there was a sig­ni­fic­ant shift from single authored to multi-authored art­icles (the author can­not con­trol for other factors that might have neces­sit­ated or encour­aged this shift). One of the beau­ties of this data was that the date of con­nec­tion to BiT­net is known and can be imme­di­ately cor­rel­ated to the pub­lish­ing his­tory. Gold­farb fur­ther indexed the date by meas­ur­ing the qual­ity of the school by amount of research fund­ing received and eval­u­ated the phys­ical dis­tance between col­la­bour­at­ing research­ers.
Clearly Bit­net did facil­it­ate col­lab­or­a­tion. When both author’s schools have bit­net, there is a pos­it­ive and sig­ni­fic­ant stat­ist­ical rela­tion­ship. But, does bit­ent amp­lify exist­ing col­la­bour­a­tions, or cre­ate new ones? Ulti­mately the simple answer is that it increased the amount of exist­ing col­la­bour­a­tion espe­cially middle tier schools. How­ever, is BiTNet-enabled col­la­bour­a­tion a sub­sti­tute for face-to-face col­la­bour­a­tion? The answer to this ques­tion is a qual­i­fied no. The col­la­bour­a­tions ten­ded towards col­loc­ated insti­tu­tions.