Science
The global crowdfunding market has already reached one and a half billion dollars and continues to grow. However, besides quantitative growth, qualitative changes are outlined. Crowdfunding of art projects, gadgets, public and political campaigns is already mainstream. But co-financing research is still new. Crowdfunding of science is interesting not only as an additional source of research funding, but also as a way of popularizing science, a bridge between a wide audience and scientists.
The world economy in 2011 spent a total of about 1 trillion 333 billion dollars, or 2% of world GDP, on R & D. Naturally, most of this money comes from applied research and development, but also about 20% of the total amount, or about 270 billion, remains for basic science. Almost all the money goes to scientists through the mediation of corporate and state bureaucracy. For the vast majority of people, science continues to be something abstract.
Crowdfunding directly connects scientists with a mass audience and makes it profitable to popularize science — after all, to convince people to give money, you must first explain what they will spend. Take a look at the list of successfully financed petridish.org site projects . Each application contains a description of a scientific problem set forth in simple language — the crowdfunding format itself implies the need to be popularized. If the flywheel of scientific crowdfunding can be unleashed, and projects on sites like petridish.org will begin to collect a decent amount, it will force many scientists to seriously engage in the promotion of their work. Whereas in the case of traditional sources of financing, it is more important to negotiate with the authorities, and whether the average person understands what these scientists will do there - by and large it does not matter. The gap between the scientific elite and the “ignorant mass” is growing.
Scientific crowdfunding has other advantages over government or corporate funding. Politicians willingly give money only for what contributes to the strengthening of their power, for example, near-war developments, businessmen have little interest in projects with an uncertain financial outlook. Fundamental science in the span. But to inspire many people with a global and large-scale idea without an intelligible commercial component is quite real. For example, among the ten most popular projects on the crowdsourcing platform BOINC is the search for pulsars, the creation of a model of stellar flows in our galaxy, calculations for a large hadron collider. And among the successfully completed projects on Petridish, there is already a search for satellites of exoplanets .
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Nevertheless, there is a risk that the most popular “scientific” projects will not be the most important from the scientific point of view, but those that are simple enough to understand, or more “fun” from the point of view of the mass audience. It is possible that even outspoken charlatans will get a chance. While it is difficult to predict whether this will be a big problem. The scientific community has experience countering pseudoscience. If crowdfunding platforms rely on the authority of serious scientific organizations and approach the publication of applications as well as leading scientific journals approach the publication of articles, then the profanation of science will be avoided. In any case, applications for Petridish are now accepted only from researchers associated with universities and other official scientific organizations.
PS Scientific crowdfunding takes only the first steps, which is why all the examples in the article are taken from one highly promoted specialized site. In addition to Petridish, the #SciFund Challenge initiative, in which it was possible to raise more than one hundred thousand dollars at the rockethub.com site, can boast some success. In addition to these two projects, perhaps it is worth mentioning TechMoola and FundaGeek , which specialize in inventions and technical innovations.
The world economy in 2011 spent a total of about 1 trillion 333 billion dollars, or 2% of world GDP, on R & D. Naturally, most of this money comes from applied research and development, but also about 20% of the total amount, or about 270 billion, remains for basic science. Almost all the money goes to scientists through the mediation of corporate and state bureaucracy. For the vast majority of people, science continues to be something abstract.
Crowdfunding directly connects scientists with a mass audience and makes it profitable to popularize science — after all, to convince people to give money, you must first explain what they will spend. Take a look at the list of successfully financed petridish.org site projects . Each application contains a description of a scientific problem set forth in simple language — the crowdfunding format itself implies the need to be popularized. If the flywheel of scientific crowdfunding can be unleashed, and projects on sites like petridish.org will begin to collect a decent amount, it will force many scientists to seriously engage in the promotion of their work. Whereas in the case of traditional sources of financing, it is more important to negotiate with the authorities, and whether the average person understands what these scientists will do there - by and large it does not matter. The gap between the scientific elite and the “ignorant mass” is growing.
Scientific crowdfunding has other advantages over government or corporate funding. Politicians willingly give money only for what contributes to the strengthening of their power, for example, near-war developments, businessmen have little interest in projects with an uncertain financial outlook. Fundamental science in the span. But to inspire many people with a global and large-scale idea without an intelligible commercial component is quite real. For example, among the ten most popular projects on the crowdsourcing platform BOINC is the search for pulsars, the creation of a model of stellar flows in our galaxy, calculations for a large hadron collider. And among the successfully completed projects on Petridish, there is already a search for satellites of exoplanets .
')
Nevertheless, there is a risk that the most popular “scientific” projects will not be the most important from the scientific point of view, but those that are simple enough to understand, or more “fun” from the point of view of the mass audience. It is possible that even outspoken charlatans will get a chance. While it is difficult to predict whether this will be a big problem. The scientific community has experience countering pseudoscience. If crowdfunding platforms rely on the authority of serious scientific organizations and approach the publication of applications as well as leading scientific journals approach the publication of articles, then the profanation of science will be avoided. In any case, applications for Petridish are now accepted only from researchers associated with universities and other official scientific organizations.
PS Scientific crowdfunding takes only the first steps, which is why all the examples in the article are taken from one highly promoted specialized site. In addition to Petridish, the #SciFund Challenge initiative, in which it was possible to raise more than one hundred thousand dollars at the rockethub.com site, can boast some success. In addition to these two projects, perhaps it is worth mentioning TechMoola and FundaGeek , which specialize in inventions and technical innovations.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/145732/
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