[danielford]

I agree this won't revolutionize research, but I also think it will work really well as a funding model for certain types of researchers.

The first are researchers at small liberal arts colleges. While these institutions specialize in teaching, their faculty are often pressured to publish, but not given a lot of funding or time to write grants. If I were teaching at a small liberal arts college, I'd seriously consider this as an alternate funding model.

The second group consists of people who do research that is really interesting to a small subset of individuals, but not particularly well funded. My lab in graduate school specialized in aging research. While I was there the funding situation was brutal, and somewhere around ninety percent of the grants in our area were being rejected. There's no way a project like Microryza could have covered the costs of the entire lab, but a direct appeal to the singularity-crowd might have brought in enough to help keep things working smoothly while times were tough.