Although the COVID-19 vaccine has been recommended as the safer and more effective prevention for COVID-19 disease relative to other alternative medications, yet across the globe, many people are resistant to receiving it. Setting out to explain such a paradox, we conducted an online survey among a sample of Indonesians (N = 4758) when the World Health Organisation (WHO) granted authorisations for the clinical trial of various vaccines against COVID-19. The results revealed that participants’ support for theories that the COVID-19 vaccine is invented to harm their nation (i.e., COVID-19 vaccine conspiratorial beliefs) positively corresponded with the perceptions that international collaboration in the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial is not aligned with their nation’s actual needs (i.e., the perceived assumptive international collaboration) and negative attitudes towards the vaccine. In turn, the perceived assumptive international collaboration was positively related to negative attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccine. We also showed that the positive relationship between COVID-19 vaccine conspiratorial beliefs and the perceived assumptive international collaboration in the vaccine clinical trial was more prominent among participants who were strongly resistant to take vaccines supplied by other countries due to national pride (i.e., vaccine national glorification).

This study presents an analysis of the unprecedented growth of international research collaboration in Europe in terms of distribution of co-authorship and citation of globally indexed publications over the last decade (2009–2018). The dynamics of change that emerge from this analysis are as follows: the increasing level of international cooperation is drawing key European systems away from institutional cooperation, with stable and strong national cooperation. National scientific output, i.e. the total number of publications, remains stable, and the entire increase in the number of publications over the period should be attributed to international co-authorship publications, which are the only driving force behind the increase in the number of publications in Europe. Due to the emergence of global networked science, in which the role of national policies in cooperation is decreasing and the role of scientists is growing, the key to the development of cooperation in Europe (and in Poland) is the readiness of individual scientists to undertake international cooperation. Researchers cooperate internationally when it is profitable for them in terms of academic prestige, scientific recognition and access to research funding, which is suggested by the three models proposed here (the model of credibility cycle in science, the model of prestige maximization and the model of global science). The total number of analyzed articles indexed in the Scopus database was 5.5 million, including 2.2 million articles written in international cooperation.