Institute For The Future

Microfinancing Science

Via Science Insider comes word of an intriguing effort to bring the concept of microfinance to scientific research. Called SciFlies is reminiscent of Kickstarter. Researchers can post information about their research project, and users can send over small donations to fund their work.

 

My favorite, of the handful of projects posted on the beta version of the site, is something called "A Day in the Life", which is looking for funding for cameras to track an individual's eye movements over the course of an entire day to better understand how vision works. Even among the early projects, the range of topics is pretty diverse. There's a proposal on shrimp production and sustainability, a proposal on developing a mouse model of autism, and a study trying to determine if there are any genetic predispositions to how much or little exercise can do to ward off Alzheimer's related dementia.

 

Where I think SciFlies could be most intriguing, though, is in pairing it with localism. Take, for example, a proposal titled The Fate and Consequences of Estrogen Discharged into Tampa Bay. This isn't a vague call to understand the effects of pharmaceuticals in water in general; it's a proposal to understand the "fate and consequences" of chemicals in your drinking water (if you live in Tampa Bay.)

 

The site's rollout happens to coincide with a great article in Nature about the challenges of developing a fair process for funding research grants. As the Nature article notes, as research money has dried up, the process for paying for research has become scattered and idiosyncratic:

 

All of this puts immense pressure on the grant-review panels. Senior reviewers say that when the top one-third of proposals can be funded, the review process works well at identifying the best science. But when the success rate drops, they see the process start to fall apart. Conversations turn nit-picky and negative, with reviewers looking for any excuse not to fund a project, rather than focusing on its merits. Reviewers say that they feel forced into making impossible choices between equally worthy proposals, especially when success rates are less than 20%. "That's in a range where you have lost discrimination," says Dick McIntosh, professor emeritus of cell biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "That's a situation where you are grading exam papers by throwing them down the stairs." The chairman of the ACS panel agrees. "Deciding between the top grants, I don't want to say it's arbitrary, but it's not really based on strong criteria," he says. "It's subtle things."

 

 

Which is to say that there appears to be a lot more worthwhile stuff to study than there is money to study it. For its part, SciFlies' founders are planning to have professional peer reviewers look at proposals before they make it to the site, as an effort to ensure some basic level of quality to the research. Which is necessary, to an extent, I think. I find the idea of monitoring eye movement over the course of the day to be pretty intriguing, but, not being knowledgeable in the area, I really have no ability whatsoever to determine whether its a reasonably constructed study.

 

At the same time, I think that the review process could run into problems, depending on how it gets structured. Some researchers looking at a local watershed, for example, may not be producing new scientific knowledge, per se, but they can certainly produce some valuable community knowledge. I'll also be curious to see how open SciFlies might be to funding Citizen Science projects of self-educated tinkerers who need help funding work they do in their spare time.

 

On the other hand, if the site's standards are too lax, that presents a whole, separate set of problems.

 

That said, it's an intriguing idea--and one that, if done well, could have a huge impact on the shape of scientific research.