Co-authorship as a proxy for collaboration: a cautionary tale

International scientific collaboration has risen in the last two decades. Publications using megascience data must conform to 'rules of use' that have emerged to protect the intellectual property of the project staff. These rules enhance co-publication counts and citations and distort the use of co-publication data as a proxy for collaboration. The distorting effects are illustrated by a case study of the BRICS countries that recently issued a declaration on scientific and technological cooperation with specific thematic areas allocated to each country. It is found that with a single exception the designated research areas of collaboration are different to individual country specializations. The disjuncture between such 'collaboration' manifests as collaboration in mega-science astronomy and high-energy physics projects especially those of the Planck 2013 telescope and at CERN, Geneva. This raises questions of import to science policy, for the BRICS in particular, and the measurement of scientific collaboration more generally.