How frequent are studies being funded at that level? Based on the numbers on your website, that study is almost half your total volume.
Again, using the numbers on your site:
5,615 projects created and 364 funded is a 6.5% success rate. If I'm going to be pouring energy in to single digit success rates, they need to hit pretty hard - and while you do have some successes, right now their long-tail oddities. If experiment.com takes off and you regularly get R01-sized projects, that's awesome. But it's just not there yet.
And while "big science" does not equal good science, there are some things that just have to be paid for. I'm not talking about massive grants. And I've got experience doing the whole scrappy underdog thing. It's not a zero-sum attitude - it's that the effort for crowdfunding at the moment isn't necessarily worth what comes out of it. I think your problem is that you're conceptualizing your critics as proponents of "Big Science". I funded by dissertation with grants that aren't even approaching big science-type grants, but they brought in way more money than most of the projects on experiments.com, and required, combined, four pages worth of proposals.
> Yes, I vehemently believe it's a good thing. If we ever approach the levels of science literacy needed to create the adverse effects you're hinting at, then that would be fantastic. And, not knowing what's worth funding isn't a citizen's fault, that's on the scientist. If scientists were more vocal about their work, new opportunities, and big challenges, then of course the public would be able to identify what's worth funding.
Would they? [Citation Needed]. I'm about as science literate as the average citizen could possibly be expected to be, and as I said, I've got no idea what's worth funding in fields well past my own.
As I've said, I really like the idea of experiments.com. I've considered it in the past. I'll keep an eye on it in the future. But right now, suggesting it as an alternative to traditional funding streams, or even industry funding is, at this point, just not realistic.
Sure! Point taken. What do you think it would take for it to work?
By the way the number you want is 860 projects launched. The 5,615 figure is people who've started working on a project but haven't launched. So closer to ~42% success rate.
That is, I'll admit, a much better success rate. Still not as high as I'd like, but I was honestly surprised by my ~7% figure - I didn't figure it was actually that bad.
I can't give you a specific figure, but off the cuff? I'd like to see decent numbers of projects regularly getting funded at the ~ 50K level. That would have a couple benefits:
- We're now talking about a year's funding for a postdoc/grad student/significant % effort for a prof. This is I think a fundamental hurdle. We can't pretend that crowdsourcing is a viable funding stream if someone else has to keep the payroll going.
- 50K is also about the level, at least in my field, where we can talk about long-term investment purchases. Equipment, computers, larger datasets...the kinds of things that are hard to put on a single project.
- That's also about the point where spending time on crowdfunding campaigns likely won't irk chairs, tenure committees, etc. A couple years back I asked the folks in the fiscal office at my department about how a ~3-5K crowdsourcing project would work, and I got serious side eye.
- It's also about where modest but decent pilot grants come in in my field generally.
That's great and very concrete, thanks. It's funny, at those levels is also where more friction starts to get introduced, because suddenly the system rears its ugly head and tries to co-opt it. If you were to regularly bring in $50k, suddenly the university wants more than half of it and it dawns on you that you don't quite need the university as much as they need you.
The extreme is a Jack Horner type who would eschew academia (but oh, the creative control he has!), but the thing I like about the size that we are right now is that we're flying under the radar of the tier-1 schools, and we're just funding and seeing lots of cool stuff. I'll happily duel university administrators in the future, but for now we get to focus on small pockets of really impactful science.
For the record, you can prevent the university carrying off half of the grant by stating as an official policy that you only pay X% overhead, where X is some much more reasonable number like 15.
Many private companies do this, and as long as it's something that's stated clearly and publicly, grants offices often go along.
Again, using the numbers on your site:
5,615 projects created and 364 funded is a 6.5% success rate. If I'm going to be pouring energy in to single digit success rates, they need to hit pretty hard - and while you do have some successes, right now their long-tail oddities. If experiment.com takes off and you regularly get R01-sized projects, that's awesome. But it's just not there yet.
And while "big science" does not equal good science, there are some things that just have to be paid for. I'm not talking about massive grants. And I've got experience doing the whole scrappy underdog thing. It's not a zero-sum attitude - it's that the effort for crowdfunding at the moment isn't necessarily worth what comes out of it. I think your problem is that you're conceptualizing your critics as proponents of "Big Science". I funded by dissertation with grants that aren't even approaching big science-type grants, but they brought in way more money than most of the projects on experiments.com, and required, combined, four pages worth of proposals.
> Yes, I vehemently believe it's a good thing. If we ever approach the levels of science literacy needed to create the adverse effects you're hinting at, then that would be fantastic. And, not knowing what's worth funding isn't a citizen's fault, that's on the scientist. If scientists were more vocal about their work, new opportunities, and big challenges, then of course the public would be able to identify what's worth funding.
Would they? [Citation Needed]. I'm about as science literate as the average citizen could possibly be expected to be, and as I said, I've got no idea what's worth funding in fields well past my own.
As I've said, I really like the idea of experiments.com. I've considered it in the past. I'll keep an eye on it in the future. But right now, suggesting it as an alternative to traditional funding streams, or even industry funding is, at this point, just not realistic.