ScienceExchangeScience Exchange, a science services marketplace, links people in research institutions that have specialized service offerings with researchers that need access to those core services.
"Science Exchange was developed to create a marketplace for scientific collaboration where researchers can order experiments from the world's best labs," says Elizabeth Iorns, Science Exchange CEO. "The premise is that this collaboration would, in turn, increase the efficiency of scientific research."

 From 1980 to 2012, there's been an exponential rise in the number of people coming together and collaborating to make scientific advances. "We've seen almost a doubling in the number of authors per paper in the research that we looked at, which was not restricted to biomedical research, but all different fields," notes Iorns. "The number of institutions involved in each paper is rising as well. It's not just that the labs are getting bigger or that you're bringing in different groups of individuals at one institution. You really need to go across institutions to find the right instrumentation or expertise."

Currently, the vast majority of scientists collaborating on research use a bartering method. One researcher essentially performs an experiment for another in exchange for authorship on a paper, or in order to build or maintain their network of collaborators. This methodology is, unfortunately, fairly inefficient. It's time consuming to find professional colleagues to work with – and the need for more and different experts can easily become all consuming.

Science Exchange simplifies market-driven collaboration: The person who is ordering, designing, and funding the experiment owns the experiment, and the person who is performing the experiment receives payment – proper incentive – for doing so. "We think that market-driven collaboration offers many opportunities to improve the efficiency and quality of research," says Iorns. "We're excited about how many researchers are using Science Exchange to accelerate their research and we believe that science, particularly in the academic sector, will operate fundamentally differently in the next five years because of the rise of technologies like science as a service."


Source: this is an extract from a larger web article by ISGTW - International Science Grid This Week

More info: www.scienceexchange.com