Avi Goldfarb presented a fast, concise, and effective discussion of what conclusions could be drawn about the multi-institutional 
collaboration 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 to answering these questions was simple: compare pair-quality 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 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 of 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 the 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 BitNET 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.
