[alsocasey]

> I'm in biomedical sciences, have a Ph.D. and will be a professor at a very good school soon, but I don't give a crap about somebody's degrees.

Many funding opportunities in academia are still tied to holding a graduate degree though.

[untilHellbanned]

I know, but Kickstarter, Experiment, Onarbor...that too will change.

[Thriptic]

You think so?

I highly doubt crowd sourced, non-industry funding will ever be able to fund R01 or even transition grant level projects sustainably, and among all projects I can only see highly translational projects which are easier to pitch to the public getting funded through this model.

All the existing players have an incentive to maintain the status quo as far as government and industry funding goes, and the infrastructure requirements and regulatory issues associated with practicing biomedical science make it basically impossible to break out of the traditional academic or industry model.

From the research side, academics who have gotten PhDs, post-doced for 5 years, been associate professors for years, and then finally gotten faculty spots would be furious to see scarce grants start going to people who haven't put in that time.

From the government side, I haven't seen many bold ideas in terms of funding come out of NIH or NSF. I saw Francis Collins speak at MIT about a month ago iirc, and he had essentially nothing to say on the subject except that he hopes the situation will improve and that they were introducing "bold" new grants which would facilitate post-doc transitions faster.

[untilHellbanned]

> You think so?

Yes.

> I highly doubt crowd sourced, non-industry funding will ever be able to fund R01

I'd be careful about the "highly doubt" part. This sounds like something the Blackberry or Blockbuster would have CEO said.

> All the existing players have an incentive to maintain the status quo

They don't care what the status quo is. Nobody sings three cheers to their alma-mater US govt. grant agencies. People care about getting money to do their work. Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Cell press didn't exist until they did and then their money and power started talking and everyone listened.

> then finally gotten faculty spots would be furious

The market will have no sympathy for this.

NIH budget is $30 Billion. Many crappy internet businesses, Yahoo, have that kind of money. People spend more than that on iPhones. If the "crowd" mobilizes to any extent like it is prone to do on the internet, the collective purchasing power will have no problem blowing away the NIH. Kickstarter is already crossing this threshold. It has already raised several billion and its only 5 years old and that number is growing exponentially. It's happening. The ivory tower has been warned.

[sliverstorm]

The main problem with Kickstarter is people are intolerant of failure. They see their money as a purchase, not an investment with uncertain payoff. With that kind of attitude in place, how is anybody going to fund hundreds of extremely experimental drugs (or what have you) via Kickstarter?

[untilHellbanned]

"intolerant of failure" is almost the opposite of how the majority of people give money through crowdfunding. You really have to use these platforms more. The whole idea is a culture of benevolence.

[mtbcoder]

I disagree, at least for the foreseeable future. The amount of resources and energy needed to convince the general public to fund "difficult-to-understand" research which is needed to solve larger "difficult-to-understand" problems will be too great of barrier to overcome for most research groups. I think crowd-funding in research will be ancillary at best for a long time.

[Thriptic]

You're absolutely right in saying that we need to increase our budget, and that the citizenry could afford to crowd fund science sustainably if they chose to do so.

Outside of the obvious issues with implementing crowd funded science in an academic setting (Who owns the IP? How does overhead work? How do you verify that the work is being done if there are no deliverables and a high failure rate? How much money can go to salary? etc). The two obvious problems I see with crowd funding science are lack of ROI and ignorant investors.

> People spend more than that on iPhones.

> Kickstarter is already crossing this threshold. It has already raised several billion and its only 5 years old and that number is growing exponentially.

People get ROI at Kickstarter in the form of products. People get ROI in the form of utility from buying Apple products. There is no obvious route to ROI from crowdfunding science. Perhaps a system can be devised where investors are invited to take part in some of the work or can track the progress and get regular briefs, but this would be enormously distracting to the investigators. Maybe I'm just cold hearted, but I simply don't see people giving away billions of dollars per year to fund science (I would love to be proven wrong though!)

The second potential issue with crowd funding science is the difficulty in evaluating the merit of proposed projects. The general public (and most of the scientific community) is not qualified to evaluate the legitimacy or impact of highly domain specific projects. How do people decide what is a good project vs a bad project within a discipline? How do people evaluate projects across disciplines? Sexy translational projects involving novel therapeurics / device development may be easily pitched, but who is going to invest in boring basic science in a zebra fish model? What happens when groups come in to take advantage of this ignorance and pitch bullshit projects and then walk away with the money? This situation also dissuades people from funding young investigators. If people don't understand the projects, they're likely to fund people with established track records and titles because that seems safer, not new people.

As I have espoused in previous threads involving the academic science model, one way to solve our current funding problem and the problem of title requirements may be to augment the academic science model with for profit (or not for profit) institutes. I would envision such institutes immediately granting PhD or post-doc level investigators PI status so that they could apply for all grants, and allowing BS level scientists to do research without having to go through PhD programs. Such institutes might also uncap investigator salaries so that investigators could be paid fairly, and would allow investigators to own their IP. These places could also charge significantly less overhead than universities as they don't need to fund non-science related endeavors. Perhaps crowd funding could be used to establish or augment such institutes, which could then bring in established investigators to oversee how money raised is distributed.

Another solution to the funding and title problems is simply to increase government funding, but tie in rules which stipulate that universities much raise the number of faculty spots or add restricted faculty spots for very junior investigators.

These seem like plausible solutions, but the idea of a crowd funded marketplace for science seems frankly dubious.

[untilHellbanned]

> Outside of the obvious issues with implementing crowd funded science in an academic setting (Who owns the IP? How does overhead work? How do you verify that the work is being done if there are no deliverables and a high failure rate? How much money can go to salary? etc). The two obvious problems I see with crowd funding science are lack of ROI and ignorant investors.

I guess we will just have to agree to disagree. I'm of the mindset that the market solves everything and will answer all the questions you pose. Academia/govt. is horribly inefficient and the money is running out there for several the reasons such as no deliverables. It academia/govt was forced to bail space exploration (SpaceX), it seems much easier to understand how this will happen in other sectors.

[Thriptic]

> I'm of the mindset that the market solves everything and will answer all the questions you pose. Academia/govt. is horribly inefficient and the money is running out there for several the reasons such as no deliverables.

The government funds basic science specifically because the market WON'T do it. A classic example is the work done on early cancer research. This breakthrough work along with several blockbuster drugs came entirely out of government sponsored research and work in academia. Pharmaceutical companies weren't interested in performing the basic research because they didn't forsee a good ROI. It was only after basic research was done and the market developed that pharmaceutical companies became interested in what is now one of the most lucrative drug categories.

http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/68/21/8643.long

[wycx]

Do we want to make research even more winner-takes-all than it currently is? Is is important to conduct research across all disciplines, or only the ones that are appealing to those who might like to fund research via Kickstarter etc.

Call me elitist, but I do not think the wisdom of the crowds will lead to the consistent funding necessary to maintain a base level of expertise across all disciplines.