Forum:Microryza: Crowdfunding Science

Question

[Damian Kao]

https://www.microryza.com/

It's basically a kickstarter for scientific research. While it's a cool idea and can be nice for undergraduate or graduate researchers as an extra source of reagent money, I do have a couple of concerns:

• What criteria does the site use to approve proposals?
• What is really the incentive for public to donate money? Kickstarter gives rewards for donations, what will the public get for their donations?
• How does academic institutions view this source of money? The site says money is given officially as "gifts" to the academic institution and put under the researcher's project budget.

Answer 1

[Pawel Szczesny]

Microryza isn't the only such site. See OKF page for comprehensive list of crowdfunding science sites. Details of approval of projects are also listed.

How the academic institution sees this kind of financial support really depends on the institution (and the country). In most cases I'm aware of, institutions do not extract their usual overheads from such money.

As for incentive for the public... Basically, wow factor and personal interests (the project is about agriculture and you're a farmer) play a huge role in here. You can also try a mixed model - participation and funding in the way uBiome did (they raised over $350K). uBiome asks for samples and ask people to pay for the analysis of the samples.

Answer 2

[Istvan Albert]

What I would like is a crowd-funding to add features/documentations/tutorials to existing bioinformatics tools.

Many projects languish because they are too small/cheap to obtain a grant to cover ongoing maintenance but are too expensive to be supported for free.

[Pawel Szczesny]

Typically such tasks were done at hackatons, not via direct grant funding. BTW, can Biostar host a hackaton (online, virtual, etc.)? Given the size of the community, 10 hours long hackaton would actually move some tools or ideas quite ahead.

[Istvan Albert]

I think we would need to first attract more tool developer that would support their tools via BioStar - then we can think of expanding on that.