What this author considers a novel, future direction for science is something that I call "going to work in the morning." The US Department of Energy operates

What this author considers a novel, future direction for science is something that I call "going to work in the morning." The US Department of Energy operates many user facilities distributed around the country, including nanotechnology centers, electron microscopy centers, neutron facilities, and X-ray facilities. (I run an instrument at one of the X-ray facilities.) Access to these facilities is free to the user and available through a peer-reviewed proposal system. In many cases, these facilities provide access to equipment and experimental techniques that don't exist at individual institutions. In some cases (notably at the nano-centers) capabilities are provided that might be available at a university or a company, but the nano-center provides access to a very broad suite of instrumentation as well as access to expert staff. While there might be a concern that the proposal system would cater to insiders (as one commenter discussing CERN suggests below), that is not my experience. I regularly have new folks coming to use my instrument. My caveat here is that my field is in the physical sciences, while the author works in the life sciences. The user facility concept is specialty of the DoE and, while DoE user facilities do serve many life science users, it grew out of a physical sciences funding agency. Still, the user facility concept works well and is a model that could address the sort of distributed yet collaborative science that the author describes.