Time Banking for Scientists

Scientific research is becoming increasingly complex and multidisciplinary, requiring the involvement of experts from different disciplines. However, as funding for science is progressively decreasing, researchers struggle to find resources for realizing their projects.

As a consequence, many promising ideas are lost: this unefficient system not only puts significant barriers in the advancement of scientific knowledge, but also has a negative impact on society at large, since it is well-known that science is one of the main drivers of innovation.

I suggest that time banking could be an effective strategy to counter the scarcity of funding for science and foster open collaboration among researchers. The concept is straightforward: experts from any discipline volunteer their time to provide scientific advice or services to other researchers, and earn time credits that can be spent when receiving a consultancy from another scientist. This strategy could have several advantages. The first—and most obvious—is that time banking could help researchers realizing their ideas without seeking external funding, a process that is becoming increasingly competitive and frustrating. Furthermore, scientists could use this mechanism to seek new collaborations and extend their network. The time banking process may also encourage researchers at an early stage of their careers to push their projects forward.

Since its introduction in the early 19th century, the idea of time-based currency exchanges has been successfully applied in many social collaboration contexts in order to facilitate the exchange of skills and competences within a community. In 1973, Teruko Mizushima founded the first time bank based on the concept that each hour of time given as services to others could earn reciprocal hours of services for the giver at some stage in the future. ¹ Around the end of the last century, Prof. Edgar S. Cahn founded an organization called TimeBanks USA ² as a system that would promote and support communities through exchanges of time and talents, which has now become a global movement serving as an incubator for a number of new time banking initiatives. In the last few years, the idea of time banking has been further fueled by the emergence of online communities. For example, TimeRepublik ³ is a web-based time banking platform for the global exchange of services that uses time as currency instead of money.

Although the pay-with-time model has been successfully exploited in several areas, its potential for supporting scientific collaboration is still unexplored. Yet, the idea of sharing resources among scientists is not completely new: take, for example, the emerging practice of “resource labs,” ⁴ which allow researchers who struggle to afford advanced equipment to pay for that type of experiment from a resource lab instead of doing it on their own. The introduction of “timecoins” could be the next application of the sharing economy to science, which might facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration among researchers.