Scientific Collaboration

Industry pressures compel life science organizations to collaborate, whether it be with colleagues in disparately located labs, corporate or academic partners, or outsourced service providers. Yet the generic tools and platforms available to facilitate enterprise collaboration (e.g., eRooms or Sharepoint) often are unable to manage scientific information effectively. For life science organizations, lack of interoperability between internal systems managed by collaborative partners slows knowledge transfer and impedes project progress. Providers of these solutions, in turn, suffer reputational impacts in delivering partial solutions that require extensive customization to meet the needs of scientific collaboration.

The Pistoia Alliance considers scientific collaboration an enabling domain. Activities in this area will create service specifications and signpost standards that facilitate the development of collaborative scientific workspaces that recognize the risks and rewards associated with sharing data in this type of environment. Work in this domain will critically support projects in in the chemistry and biology domains.