I have yet to meet a (academic) researcher that doesn't like to talk about their research topic if somebody comes and is genuinely interested. I mean most work on a topic that has maybe another 10-100 people in the world who are interested.
The problem is that instead most people to come to them are either obvious crackpots, who think they have solved cancer (energy...) and contact the person because they are a biologist, physicist ... (on a completely unrelated topic usually). Or they come from a place of arrogance, i.e. "we do ... like this, our method is clearly superior you should adopt it", or even worse here buy our clearly superior method.
An example I can think of off the top of my head is Luis Alvarez, the nobel physicist who came up with the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction. The geology and paleontology community shunned him until the 90s when the Chicxulub crater was discovered (though geology is historically infamous for this, to the extent that nearly every important paradigm shift in geology was made by non-geologist outsiders who faced ridicule for their theories)
Yeah. I've been a part of a number of academic projects, and though my career has been in the private sector, my experience is that collaboration across fields and disciplines is relatively pain free (though maybe not a priority because the pathway to a pub and impact is not obvious). I think most people want to work with other interested people.
In my limited experience, the friction is between labs and groups that are working on very similar things, and the competition is direct and obvious. And even here, the source of the conflict is the reward structures of the field, not some aversion to collaboration or personal arrogance.
The problem is that instead most people to come to them are either obvious crackpots, who think they have solved cancer (energy...) and contact the person because they are a biologist, physicist ... (on a completely unrelated topic usually). Or they come from a place of arrogance, i.e. "we do ... like this, our method is clearly superior you should adopt it", or even worse here buy our clearly superior method.