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General Science / Re: How does crowdsourcing work in scientific projects?
« on: 02/11/2015 08:48:23 »
I guess crowdsourcing has always been used by scientific journals to peer-review papers submitted for publication.
There was recently another type of crowdsourcing scientific research in Australia.
The MOPRA telescope is mapping molecular dust clouds in the plane of the Milky Way. But the government decided not to fund them to finish the task they had set themselves.
So they appealed to the general public, and managed to raise enough money to finish their initially planned survey (and a little bit more). So they survive another year, and will start to map molecular dust clouds further outside the plane of the galaxy (hopefully detecting any that might be heading our way...). http://mopra.org/
Crowdfunding is a little different than traditional science grant applications (eg "What design will be print on the T-Shirts?" and "How much should we charge to 'name' a molecular gas cloud?").
Crowdfunding has been used by the Planetary Society to fund a pilot solar sail, and another project proposing a satellite looking for Near-Earth Asteroids is also looking for public funding.
I guess anything that inspires the public to dip into their pockets to help science is a good thing (and more productive than the horse race that will have most Australians dipping into their pockets tomorrow).
There was recently another type of crowdsourcing scientific research in Australia.
The MOPRA telescope is mapping molecular dust clouds in the plane of the Milky Way. But the government decided not to fund them to finish the task they had set themselves.
So they appealed to the general public, and managed to raise enough money to finish their initially planned survey (and a little bit more). So they survive another year, and will start to map molecular dust clouds further outside the plane of the galaxy (hopefully detecting any that might be heading our way...). http://mopra.org/
Crowdfunding is a little different than traditional science grant applications (eg "What design will be print on the T-Shirts?" and "How much should we charge to 'name' a molecular gas cloud?").
Crowdfunding has been used by the Planetary Society to fund a pilot solar sail, and another project proposing a satellite looking for Near-Earth Asteroids is also looking for public funding.
I guess anything that inspires the public to dip into their pockets to help science is a good thing (and more productive than the horse race that will have most Australians dipping into their pockets tomorrow).
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