Institutes Ad Infinitum

More than fortune and fame, the dream in the heart of most scientists is autonomy. They lament the bureaucratic interference and administrative overhead that occupies so much of academic life. This is the central drive behind all the new institutional experiments in science. For every new organization announced — Arcadia, Spec Tech, Invisible College — I hear from a handful of others with hopes of something similar. Everyone's focused on those who are leaving the university-based academic system, but more striking to me is how many are still inside with their eyes on the exit sign.

It's easy to see why. I encourage reading Seemay Chou's full Arcadia manifesto to get a sense of the weight being lifted off the scientists’ shoulders in their new digs:

While I could see systemic issues as a student and postdoc, professorships felt like the only way to have a research program with the freedom to pursue knowledge for curiosity’s sake. However, the full weight of academic pressures hit me like a ton of bricks the first year I became faculty — there was no liberation at the end of the path. The scarcity mindset we adopt in a system with a very narrow definition of success throws you into survival mode. You’re constantly preparing the next grant or manuscript despite these being fairly disconnected from the actual work on the ground. It is exhausting, particularly for women and other minoritized individuals who overcome inherent bias and are relentlessly called on for service on top of everything else.

And the thrill of venturing out:

Admittedly, I was nervous about what science outside academia would look like and what kind of compromises I would be forced to make. However, I was soon living the dream I didn’t even know I had: building an awesome team of super smart scientists to do high-risk exploratory science that had long-term translational potential.

There is, of course, an uncertain path ahead for all the independents, but the autonomy is certainly there. There’s an entrepreneurial energy that comes from controlling your own destiny, and it's a key ingredient to great work.

How to scale that sense of agency?

Certainly, there's a practical limit to the number of people who can join Arcadia or Arc. But what if we're thinking about new institutes too narrowly? What if instead of being rare and exquisite, they also became cheap and ubiquitous? Instead of the mental image of fancy buildings and generous benefactors, imagine they were made to be as simple as LLCs have become for commercial real estate. Institues ad infinitum.

This is a wildly achievable future through scaled-up fiscal sponsorship. A non-profit could use Open Collective and start sponsoring scientists next week. They already have the backend to do this at scale. The Open Source Collective (OSC) is the umbrella organization for more than 3,000 open source software projects. All the funding is transparently raised and allocated with streamlined paperwork for the overseeing organization. Pia Mancini, the founder of Open Collective, told me those 3,000 projects are being managed by few part-time employees at the OSC. The software enables astounding leverage.

Starting a new institute could be as simple as spinning up an AWS instance (instead of needing to raise hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, create a board, and wait six months for IRS approval). This idea has important implications, especially in terms of managing future intellectual property that comes from the research. If a scientist had a project that didn't use any university equipment, they could spin up a new institute to manage grant funds (and keep any unwelcome hands out of any IP claims). If two researchers from different institutions wanted to collaborate and co-own IP, just spin up a new institute. Want more control over your grant budget? New institute. Institutes ad infinitum.

We could call these new organizations meta-institutes — non-profits that fiscally host many new institutes.

The math works. The indirect fees and overhead rates that most universities charge on grants are upwards of 50%. Grant-givers have tried to rein that in by imposing limits. The Gates Foundation, for example, caps the indirect fees at 10% for US universities and 15% for NGOs. But that's still a wide margin to undercut. Most fiscal hosts on Open Collective charge less than that amount. So if a new meta-institute charges 6% overhead and processes more than $1,000,000 in grants, the unit economics should be enough to keep at least a part-time staff of accountants and lawyers to make it sustainable. I'd love to see a competitive race to the bottom: better rates and more scientist-friendly IP policies.

We could do this at the Experiment Foundation. Ronin and IGDORE already do it, but a slightly different model and still at smaller scales. Heck, ten more non-profits could. This would change the tenor of the evolving scientific landscape — instant leverage for scientists everywhere.

It's become popular, almost passé, to argue that science needs new institutions. What if we just need more? Lots more.