Crowd funding has been successfully used to launch many new inventions, musical and artistic projects. Will scientists now turn to crowd funding or is this merely a passing fad?
Interesting question! I just recently encountered "crowd funding", a music band I know is using crowd to fund their first album. I think its a very promising development.
However, in this case, if you fund them you get all different kind of treats (the album with signatures of the musicians and so forth). How could we do this in science? Especially, with basic science? I think that the opportunities are quite limited, because most research is not intuitively important to everybody. So the project would need to be on subjects many people really have an interest in. Also, I doubt that many people would like to pay for a researchers salary....
So, I think that other approaches like "citizen science" will have more impact in the future science than something like crowd funding. BTW citizen science has also the power to reduce costs for large scale research projects, or make it even possible.
Look at this for example: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018927
That is very interesting. I have never heard of citizen science before. It would work, but only with specific kinds of data collection.
Have you looked at the SciFund challenge on Rockethub? Or group is starting a crowd funding project with them on Monday.
That is new to me! Looks interesting and may work well if you have a small project and a cool story behind it.
Yes, I agree that the type of project and research is important. I am curious about whether it will work or not. If you are interested I will send you the link.
Yes I am! I would be also interested in how the people who support you are informed about the outcome of the research, I wasn´t able to find a link to papers etc. on the rockethub-page.
Here is the site at which our project is located:
http://rkthb.co/11806
It should be interesting.
Hmn. Upside to this: scientists writing grants are required to express ideas in lay language, so they can cast a wider net.
Downsides: peer review is useful as a quality control mechanism.
Pretty much...although honestly crowd funding does not generate the same kind of funding as a grant so I wouldn't lose sleep over something like that. Also, peer review is an imperfect mechanism. Sure, sometimes it leads to rigorous quality assurance but on the other hand, what about politics, entrenchment and the old boy's network (which my university is not a part of BTW).
We have a new project, BTW our first project generated 114% of our goal
http://rkthb.co/36715
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