What’s going on in the UK: 2-15 June

This week: Jubilee honours, innovation for Ukraine, alarm over arts funding and more

Remote collaboration

A study from Oxford Martin School has found that long-distance collaboration between academics has become a boon for, rather than a drag on, scientific breakthroughs over the past decade. A working paper with an analysis of data from over 10 million research teams from 1961 to 2020 said face-to-face interactions still matter, but it outlines that digital knowledge networks complement local ones and increase the size of the ‘collective brain’. The recent positive impact is a break from the past: long-distance collaboration led to fewer disruptive ideas from the 1960s to the 2000s, but beginning in the 2010s, the “negative impact tapers off and even becomes positive”, which the study credits to “improvements in key technologies needed for effective remote collaboration”.