I hope this question fits into this forum. If not, please let me know and I'll kindly remove it.
I'm a second-year PhD student, working in network biology and in-silico pharmacology. This is to say that I have a stable position. However, I've been recently persuaded by initiatives like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and PeoplePerHour. Although disparate, both initiatives offer the possibility of customizable, free-time tasks that can take an hour or so.
I wonder if similar initiatives exist for bioinformaticians. I can easily see its uses, for instance in performing sporadic data analyses or pipeline designs. To me it sounds like a fun extra job.
If I may, I've looked into them before posting. Most of these discussion are on bioinformatics freelancing in general. I've narrowed my question to simple and fast tasks I could do in my free time, much like PeoplePerHour and Mechanical Turk from Amazon.
There are several fundamental challenges when it comes to bioinformatics freelancing and I will try to enumerate them here:
The field itself is extremely new and changing fast, very different methodologies need to be used for different subdomains, it is very hard to keep up with more than one area of applications
It is exceedingly difficult to properly estimate the complexity of a given task - I myself am surprised time and again just how often I underestimate these. Moreover the people that would need this work are the ones with the least amount of understanding of it.
A job' success will be judged by the novel insights it generates and not quality of the data analysis yet as a freelancer you will have exactly zero input on proper experimental design and process.
The biggest obstacle: good data are easier to analyze. People will get by with rudimentary approaches and techniques. What you will get as a freelancer are the problems nobody around could solve. So you'll get the tough stuff. The worst quality data, the more convoluted effects, the more harebrained experimental designs etc.
I am not saying freelancing is not possible - it is just fraught with many problems that make it even more difficult than say software freelancing. Probably one of the most important skills would be the ability to say no to most projects that come your way and only taking on the winning ones.A bit like picking winning stocks.
Sounds to me like a great new addition to Biostars! People pitch their bioinformatic problems, the Biostars community decides which projects are worth people's time, and then once a project is validated/accepted/given the green light, people can start working on it :)
I agree with everything Istvan has said. However, I do think there could be a workable model for part-time bioinformatics free-lancing in the form of consultants. There could be a service/company/collective which helps connect domain experts with companies (or even academic labs) to provide expert advice to help design experiments, understand bioinformatics challenges, or expand into new areas. For example, many companies are currently expanding into the "next-gen" and clinical sequencing space and there are some opportunities for part-time consultant positions to help them get their companies started, design analysis pipelines, etc. However, these kind of jobs will tend to go to more senior people who have 10+ years of experience and proven track-record in these specific domains. Googling "bioinformatics consulting" I discovered that Istvan is director of a bioinformatics consulting center at Penn State. So, his advice is probably very well-grounded. :-)
LOL. I think it is still somewhere in between. There is a huge demand for informatics expertise in certain areas but also seems to be some resistance to outsourcing bioinformatics. Understandable I think given that you are handing control over of arguably the most important step of research. Seems like people would rather had mediocre informatics staff in house than send their data to someone else. ;-)
Just about 7 years later, I thought to add that full-time freelancing is now a real possibility, and I (and others I know) are living proof of this. In fact, I have much more to do as a freelancer than I have had in any past full-time role.
It is challenging work and can eat away at your personal life unless you set strict limits. As an example, working across time-zones makes it very difficult due to the fact that there is always, 24/7, a customer / client somewhere in the World that is looking for something.
Having a very diverse background (as I do) really helps.
note that there are a lot of similar discussions already: http://www.biostars.org/search/?q=bioinformatics+freelance&t=Question&submit=
If I may, I've looked into them before posting. Most of these discussion are on bioinformatics freelancing in general. I've narrowed my question to simple and fast tasks I could do in my free time, much like PeoplePerHour and Mechanical Turk from Amazon.