JRC report on crossdisciplinarity in the biosciences

Patrícia Gomes-Alves, iBET researcher and member of the European Society for Animal Cell Technology (ESACT), participated in the discussion group towards the definition of the scientific report “Bridging Across Methods in the Biosciences“.

This report, published by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), combines the result from previous studies with the outcomes from the workshop requesting views on crossdisciplinarity in biosciences from representatives of a variety of scientific societies, associations and agencies.

Crossdisciplinary research is critical to science and to properly address societal needs. However, biosciences still show a high level of compartmentalisation. This report suggests specific actions to foster the understanding, achievement and evaluation of crossdisciplinarity in the biosciences and provides evidence-based scientific support to the European policymaking process. Main recommendations are:

● “Gain a better understanding of cases where scientific methods do succeed in becoming bridgeable across disciplines and sectors, through analysis of historical and current paradigm cases, and extract lessons from these”

● “Create new opportunities to facilitate and experiment with ways to bridge across methods”

● “Analyse existing policies and initiatives regarding open access, open science and others, and see what gaps there are between data and method complementarity”

● “Include more explicit criteria for crossdisciplinary research and bridgeability across methods in funding calls, and in assessments of research and innovation projects”

Click here to read the full report.