Nicole Gerber: It increases the benefits and impact of a project. Simply put, we can achieve more together. Given the ever growing pressure on funding, we should of course use resources in a way that leads to the best possible solutions. Vicente Carabias: It starts with understanding the problem. Drawing on expertise from multiple disciplines automatically provides a better grasp of the initial situation. A single discipline on its own can often only tweak individual aspects. Gerber: Exactly, and while adjusting individual aspects may perhaps solve one problem, it can potentially create negative consequences in another area. An interdisciplinary perspective helps identify impacts and interdependencies at an early stage and provides a better basis upon which decisions can be made. As a university of applied sciences, we have a central role to play: in practice, a great deal is driven by vested interests. Our task is to contribute, at a meta level, to providing a broader perspective on developments and innovations, independently of profit-driven considerations. Carabias: What I particularly appreciate are the synergies that arise between stakeholders. When people work together, much more can emerge than when individual disciplines work in isolation. This is incredibly inspiring. Interdisciplinary collaboration creates added value because it enables a more holistic analysis of complex problems, fosters more innovative solutions and makes organisations more adaptable and capable of learning. Gerber: There is also an interpersonal synergy that can develop beyond the actual subject itself. I enjoy working together with people who have a high level of intrinsic motivation. This often gives rise to new projects and initiatives. «A solid depth of discipline-specific knowledge is still required in order to engage with subject specialists on an equal footing.» Vicente Carabias, lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Sustainable Development Carabias: Initially, it involves additional effort. The process of finding common ground is extremely time-consuming and can be demanding. You have to explain your own perspective and try to understand others. Engineers tend to take a very pragmatic approach and get started quickly, while social scientists often prefer more extensive discussions first. A good balance has to be found here, and conflicts in terms of objectives are common. Openness and attentiveness are crucial. Gerber: Research questions need to be formulated jointly, while methodological approaches also have to be defined with input from both sides. This takes significantly more time than is the case with mono-disciplinary projects. It usually involves a deliberate combination of complementary methods, for example interviews and simulations. Carabias: Misunderstandings also often occur because terminology is interpreted differently. When I studied environmental sciences, I was always told: “You are generalists. You gain insights into natural sciences, engineering and social sciences – your role is to understand and translate between specialists.” This is precisely the role I take on today in my projects. I am interested in many areas, but do not know every detail. I see myself more as a coordinator and connector. Gerber: I feel the same. Not everyone who excels in their own particular field works well as part of an interdisciplinary team. That’s why you need both people with deep subject expertise and people who can orchestrate the bigger picture. Carabias: Exactly. You need disciplinary depth within the team in order to be taken seriously by all stakeholders. Fortunately, we have outstanding specialists in many relevant disciplines at our institute, particularly when it comes to handling topics relating to sustainability. Carabias: I would describe it more as a negotiation process. Each person brings their own expertise and their individual way of thinking to the table. When there is disagreement, negotiation is necessary. Gerber: It depends very much on the context. In larger projects, the dynamics differ considerably from those in smaller constellations. I think it is a shame when participants are not open to new ideas. Not everyone finds it equally easy to engage with input from other disciplines and functions. That's why it has to be clear to everybody who has what decision-making authority. Facilitation and orchestration are crucial skills that are underestimated by many people. It is not about managing individuals, but rather about moving the entire group forwards. This requires a great amount of time and effort which has to be explicitly planned and budgeted. «Our task is to contribute, at a meta level, to providing a broader perspective on developments and innovations, independently of purely profit-driven considerations.» Nicole Gerber, lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Facility Management Gerber: You have to ask yourself whether a single discipline can solve the problem on its own or if it is necessary to think beyond this. Carabias: If the task is clearly defined, for example to optimise a product at a technical level, the team does not need to be interdisciplinary. It means you don't have to spend a great deal of effort on coordinating everything. However, if the problem is highly complex, for example climate change, the energy transition or district development, then different ways of thinking are essential in order to produce holistic and resilient solutions. This is also crucial in terms of social acceptance. In my field, it is often the case that the technically best solutions are not necessarily the ones that are best accepted. Anticipating this by involving social scientists can save a great deal of time and money. Carabias: In a scientific context, theory is much more important. Industry partners, on the other hand, are usually not interested in the methods. For them, what matters most are experiential knowledge, the implementation and the end result. As a university of applied sciences, you are somewhat caught in a dilemma: on the one hand, there is the expectation to be an academic institution, including publication pressure. At the same time, there is the goal of being application-oriented and serving society. Gerber: It really is quite a balancing act. Sometimes I also have the feeling that industry partners are not interested in theory. However, they expect us to break it down for them and explain it in a simple manner. Carabias: Yes, exactly. It should be scientific and evidence-based, but the details are of less interest. In transdisciplinary collaboration, we want to make a scientific contribution while also creating a social impact. Gerber: As a university, we are not particularly agile, as we also have various other obligations, including teaching with its curricular logic. There are also many administrative processes that have to be adhered to. However, this is often no different in large corporations. In industry, staff turnover tends to be higher, which can make projects more difficult. What's more, in the private sector there is generally a greater expectation to present interim results more frequently. That said, the academic environment is also increasingly moving towards interim evaluations rather than waiting for projects to reach their conclusion. «There is a need for new forms of project funding – moving away from rigid calls. Topics should be viewed in a new light based on incoming submissions, and solutions are to be developed collaboratively along the way.» Nicole Gerber, lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Facility Management Carabias: In funding programmes that are geared towards major societal challenges, such as Horizon Europe and the Swiss National Science Foundation’s national research programmes, it is certainly an advantage. However, it ultimately always comes down to who evaluates the project proposals. I myself sit on such committees and have often observed that jury members tend to chiefly propose projects from their own disciplines for funding. These are usually leading experts in their fields, but they do not necessarily understand what interdisciplinary work can achieve or how such projects function. That said, it also has to be acknowledged that applicants do not always successfully present their projects in a manner that makes them easy to understand for those outside their discipline. Gerber: That is exactly my experience too, and I find it frustrating time and again: there is still far too little understanding as to in what way interdisciplinary settings function differently. Interdisciplinarity is often required in calls, but there is no real space for something new to develop. You have to specify from the off which methods will be used – methods that frequently come from basic research. This is only of limited usefulness. But if you want the funding, you have no choice but to comply. I am increasingly convinced that new forms of project funding are needed. It would make more sense to shed new light on topics based on incoming submissions and then develop solutions collaboratively along the way. We need to move away from large, rigid calls that take an eternity and result in a huge waste of resources for those who are not considered in the end. Carabias: That is exactly what we are aiming for with the WinLab funding programme (editor’s note: see box). Proposals can be submitted on an ongoing basis and are evaluated four times a year. If we like an idea but it is not yet sufficiently developed, we provide feedback on what could still be improved. With most funding schemes, it is simply a matter of approval or rejection. If you are not successful, months of work are simply wasted. At the WinLab, however, we are interested in good ideas and want to develop them together. Gerber: Very forward-looking! We also need to move away from the idea of developing final products in projects that are meant to last forever. The world is changing at an increasingly rapid rate. We have to accept that. We should think more in terms of iterations: develop prototypes, implement them and then identify suitable business models to advance them further. Our funding structures are only partially suited to this. In this respect, the structure call of the Digitalization Initiative of the Zurich Higher Education Institutions (DIZH) is very promising: you have to consider how an output can be sustained and financed beyond the initial funding phase. Carabias: At the WinLab, we also have very limited resources. It is for this reason that we sometimes have the feasibility of ideas assessed by the relevant departments within the city administration. For example, an idea was submitted to detect leaks in water pipes using sensors. We presented it to the city’s civil engineering office, and it is now being implemented using their budget. That is the goal – or alternatively that ideas develop into business models that are self-sustaining. «For industry partners, what matters are experiential knowledge, implementation and the end result. As a university of applied sciences, we find ourselves caught between publication pressure and a commitment to serving society through an application-oriented approach.» Vicente Carabias, lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Sustainable Development Gerber: There are hardly any Bachelor’s programmes left without interdisciplinary components. Interdisciplinarity is essential. There is also a constantly increasing number of formats in which students from different degree programmes work together to develop solutions for actual problems, for example as part of summer schools or in innovation challenges. In Wädenswil, we are currently also undertaking a major curriculum re-engineering process: we are analysing which topics are relevant across multiple degree programmes and whether they can be taught jointly, even across institute boundaries. We need to think more in terms of broader thematic areas and less in terms of specific professions because, quite frankly, we do not know which professions will still exist in 10 to 20 years’ time. The goal must be to structure degree programmes more modularly to ensure that students can decide more independently where to place their focus – this is how new combinations of skills emerge. Carabias: I am observing a clear trend towards interdisciplinarity. This was certainly encouraged by the Bologna Reform, which defined interdisciplinarity as a key component for complex, profession-related tasks. As a university of applied sciences, it is crucial for us to make sure that our students are employable and thus capable of succeeding in the labour market. Interdisciplinarity is playing an increasingly important role in this – not only specialised knowledge, but also an openness towards other disciplines. Nevertheless, foundational studies remain important. A solid depth of discipline-specific knowledge is required in order to engage with subject specialists on an equal footing. In addition, interdisciplinary projects, modules, lab settings and living labs provide a framework in which students collaborate with other fields and learn to transfer, translate and negotiate knowledge. Gerber: Greater awareness of its importance. We need to develop ecosystems and cultivate them consciously. At present, a great deal is developed bottom-up. However, clear structures are needed if we are to make better use of synergies in the long term. When one project evolves from another, this is usually not a problem. On the other hand, when something new is to be developed from a new idea, it often involves a lot of unpaid work and goodwill. If this is then compounded by recurring administrative constraints, it will have a negative impact on motivation levels in the long run. It would be desirable to find ways to enable motivated individuals to take more joint initiative. Interview: Sara Blaser

Julia Krasselt: Some of my projects deal specifically with open research data. These include the Swiss-AL project, a language database that is to be shared with researchers from other fields. I believe that open science enriches interdisciplinary collaboration. At the same time, however, there are many new issues for researchers to deal with, such as data projection, copyright law, the choice of repositories* and data formats. Gabriela Lüthi: We advise researchers and lecturers on all aspects of open science, for example with respect to their choice of publication platforms and financing applications for open access. If we are involved at an early stage, researchers can save a great deal of time and can draw on our extensive expertise in the area of open science in a targeted manner. Claudio Cometta: I’m generally very interested in the subject of open science, as my team conducts a considerable amount of research and we publish a lot. However, we are chiefly concerned with open innovation. The relationship between open innovation and the open science movement is the subject of significant controversy. The term open innovation primarily means that companies design their innovation processes in a manner that goes beyond the boundaries of their own organisation. Universities can play an important role here as innovation partners. Krasselt: It is a stereotype that researchers keep their results and data secret out of fear that somebody else might build on them and produce something better. In the field of applied linguistics, in particular, there were pioneering projects before the notion of open research data even existed. For example, language data collections, referred to as corpora, that have been created for the research community, as we know that this data can answer a wide range of very different questions, for example about grammar or language use. Cometta: Sharing research data is by no means a contradiction to successful publishing. In fact, I’d say it is a prerequisite for it. We have been active in the field of non-technical energy research for a number of years and are often involved in research consortia with other universities and partners from industry here. Sharing data is frequently a requirement for being able to participate in such consortia. Lüthi: At present, around 60 percent of the ZHAW’s scientific publications are publicly accessible. If you include non-independently peer-reviewed publications, this figure stands as high as 70 percent. While we can be proud of these numbers, we must not forget that the open access movement is already 20 years old. Lüthi: That is rather unrealistic, but we are on the right track. At the ZHAW, some 85 percent of articles from the fields of engineering and life sciences are already publicly accessible, and around 66 percent from the social sciences. A higher share would be possible, but researchers find themselves under pressure to not just publish anywhere, but rather in prestigious journals. “As things stand, some open science principles are only compatible with legal frameworks to a limited extent.” Julia Krasselt, Professor of Digital Linguistics Lüthi: In the past, we had to pay for reading with subscriptions. Today, we have so-called read-and-publish agreements (R&P) with publishers. This means we can read the journals and articles and can also publish work in certain journals. Publishing is limited, however. It was believed that the open access movement offered a way out from increasingly expensive subscription prices. But with the R&P agreements, we are, of course, continuing to support the major publishers such as Elsevier, Springer and Wiley and are dependent on them. However, there is also an alternative, which is referred to as diamond open access. With this approach, neither reading nor publishing costs anything. Instead, funding organisations finance the platforms on which publications can be made. Lüthi: Yes. The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) announced this year that it does not intend to continue funding R&P agreements to the same extent. It also took a long time for the deal between swissuniversities and Elsevier to be concluded. As a university, you have to take a stance and consider whether to pursue alternative paths. Would we have been prepared to stop publishing with Elsevier? Cometta: I think that would be a very considerable hurdle to overcome. If you are no longer able to publish with the big players, you have a problem as a university. Researchers do not choose their publication platform according to the publisher, but rather on the basis of the relevance the individual journal holds. “Sharing research data is by no means a contradiction to successful publishing. In fact, I’d say it is a prerequisite for it.” Claudio Cometta, Head of the Innovation Systems team at the School of Management and Law The aim of the Swiss National Open Research Data Strategy is to make research data freely accessible. State research funding organisations such as the SNSF and Innosuisse make this a requirement for the projects they fund. Is this desirable for a university of applied sciences which has industrial partners, or are they running the risk of losing them with this? Cometta: In the area of economics, these conflicts of interest with industrial partners existed long before the open science era. Classic Innosuisse projects, which are intended to promote innovation in the economy but are also research based, are one such example. The solution is to reach an agreement on the degree of openness for each individual project. Lüthi: It is important to assess which data is relevant for the public. It would not be in the interest of the ZHAW to disclose all data in full. Here, too, you can save yourself a great deal of time and effort if you seek advice from the Research Data Management Service Centre and make use of a data management plan in a systematic fashion from the outset. At the ZHAW, we are organised on both a centralised and decentralised basis: in addition to the competence centres for open access and open educational resources and the ZHAW Research Data Services team, there are also people responsible for research data within the Schools who support researchers in the area of open data. This is important, as there is rarely a single solution that will work for everybody. The questions are often very subject-specific. Cometta: Absolutely. The main hurdles are data protection and the additional work involved – this is perhaps an explanation as to why open science is still less widespread in social sciences than is the case in the MINT disciplines: the less standardised or the more heterogeneous the data is, the more effort is required to make it accessible. The data needs to be prepared and you have to provide context, which entails an enormous additional effort. Krasselt: It has only been since recently that open science has even been considered in the planning of research projects – there is certainly still room for improvement here. When working as part of a consortium, it is important to set up the project correctly from the outset and to discuss the issue of governance. It is fantastic that we are able to focus on such aspects thanks to the current funding from swissuniversities*. In the past, it was difficult to consider open science when budgeting for projects. Lüthi: The funding is important, as it provides an initial spark. However, we also need to think about how we are going to establish the practice in the future. If universities are committed to open science, they also need to provide the resources and services to make it possible. Lüthi: I think that many people still do not know which data they are allowed to publish and they thus worry about potentially doing something wrong. However, there may also be data protection, contractual or commercial reasons that speak against publication. Krasselt: As things stand, some open science principles are only compatible with legal frameworks to a limited extent. In the case of our Swiss-AL project, for example, we are unable to simply upload the data to a repository, as the texts are subject to copyright protection. Different legal frameworks are also sometimes applicable to international projects. In the majority of cases, the stricter rules are then applied, which can run counter to the university’s own open research data strategy. It is important that various small-scale solutions are not sought in parallel, but rather that good practices for the handling of research data are developed as part of a larger community – this is already the case in the social sciences and the humanities. Lüthi: We are still in the development phase when it comes to open research data. Finding good solutions is not easy: you need to create a national infrastructure that meets both disciplinary requirements and international standards, ensuring that data can be exchanged. An individual institution can’t shoulder this responsibility on its own. We need national consortia with international networks. The current funding provided by swissuniversities takes this into account. «The university must not leave its researchers to grapple with these new requirements on their own.” Gabriela Lüthi, Head of the University Library Cometta: The world of science and the general public certainly benefit. With respect to open access, it is primarily universities from the Global South that were previously unable to afford access to scientific journals that will be able to capitalise. There are also the research-related institutions that utilise and multiply scientific findings. Lüthi: The coronavirus pandemic is a good example: all research results were published in a freely accessible manner, as it was of global interest to combat the virus. Everyone benefited from this: not only the scientific community, but also society, as the vaccines were developed extremely quickly. Krasselt: I don't think so. The data and research results need to be processed in a completely different way. A good example is “Switzerland’s Word of the Year,” for which the Swiss-AL language database is used. It is a high-profile project that scientifically analyses which words in Switzerland’s four national languages reflect social developments in the year in question. Lüthi: I also believe that scientific findings should not only be disseminated via publications and open research data. They need to be made available in an easily accessible manner. The University Library, for example, is open to the general public and we also organise public events on scientific topics. The ZHAW is also a member of the European Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment ( CoARA* ). Among other things, the aim of this coalition is to encourage researchers to think more about open science. In other words, they should make more contributions to scientific communication and policy advice, with such a commitment being recognised extra in the evaluation of their performance. Scientific communication represents a challenge for many researchers, however. Cometta: When I see how social media can be used as a multiplier for research results, I think that the younger generation of researchers have a completely different understanding of their role and a greater awareness that a transfer of knowledge has to take place. Krasselt: During a recent workshop, some of the older researchers were struggling with the new requirements. Today, it is almost assumed that you have programming skills and are active on social media. Open science places a large number of demands and I believe that the various generations perceive these very differently. Lüthi: The university must not leave its researchers to grapple with these new requirements on their own. It would be appropriate to give time credits for handling these demands, or at least to offer opportunities for continuing education in this area. Interview: Sara Blaser