Wanna be an honorary Scientist? Crowdfunding and Citizen Science

My Dear Sexy Readers,

From HERE

If there is something that the majority of the public doesn't know is that it's difficult to find a long term job as a research scientist, let alone a lab job - as a matter of fact at the moment - any job!!! Most people are surprised when I tell them this. Choosing a career in research is actually very very short term for most scientists, simply because they are governed by grants and these can be anything between 6 months and 5 years, with an ideal length of 3 years. Unfortunately, at the moment due to budget cuts and the sheer amount of competition, finding a grant on your subject is very very difficult. I'm glad those days are over for me, I definitely hang my labcoat up, and am now happily focusing on scientific and medical communication.
However, if a doctoral candidate chooses to stay in academia, it is understood that he can only do a maximum of 3 postdocs after which he'd better have good publications to his name and a solid research plan+funds to establish himself as a PI (Principal Investigator).
A lot of researchers have turned to the internet and the generosity of the general public to gather the essential money required to achieve an experiment (the "last" one needed for publication) or a project:
Crowdfunding is not new and didn't start with the Sciences, according to Sexy Wiki: "Crowdfunding is the collection of finance from backers—the "crowd"—to fund an initiative and usually occurs on Internet platforms. The initiative could be a nonprofit campaign (e.g. to raise funds for a school or social service organization), a political campaign (to support a candidate or political party), a charitable campaign (e.g. emergency funds for an ill person or to fund a critical operation), a commercial campaign (e.g. to create and sell a new product) or a financing campaign for a startup company.

Whenever you see this logo, it means that you get to be a Scientist ;)

Crowdfunding - Researchers in need of extra funds
What I did here is I gathered a list of crowdfunding spaces where you can browse categories and projects. There are a lot of projects out there, all over the world. If you hesitate, think about the fact that researchers usually get their money from the governement, among other sources of course such as charities. The governement decides the budget, representatives (scientists most likely) decide on behalf of the governement what project to fund. But where do you think the governement get their money from? That's right, you! Since it cannot fund everything, why not choose your own project to fund then?

From Experiment crowdfunding space

Go ahead, take your pick:
Experiment.com is a platform for enabling new scientific discoveries in Biology, Medicine, Engineering, Chemistry, Computer Science, Physics, Paleontology, Ecology, Education, Psychology and Economics

Petridish focuses in Animal Behaviour, Archeology, Astronomy, Biology, Conservation, Ecology, Genetics, Geology, Health, History, Marine Biology, Paleontology and Social Science.

RocketHub is a platform for the Arts, Sciences, Social and Business that helped fund project sin 1500 cities in 100 countries

Consano is a platform that enables you to donate any amount (small or large!) directly to a medical research project that matters to you.

The SciFund Challenge is about the massive gap between science and society. SciFund Challenge exists to do something about this problem, by helping to close this gap in three distinct ways. We train and encourage researchers in their science outreach activities. We also help connect the public directly to science and scientists. Lastly, we run science crowdfunding drives to help fund research.

SciFlies's popular projects are on Alzheimer's, Aquatics, Brain disorders, Climate, Compulsive Behaviour, Deforestation, Fish, Humans, Oceans, Physics and Stars.

Go get funding is a platform for any crowdfunding with a section on medical and healing subjects.

Endeavorist is another platform focusing on biology, medical projects, physics, etc..

Crowdsourcing - Researchers in need of extra help
Also, most scientists spend about 80% of their time analysing results. Sometimes, some of these are just observational and could well be done by anyone. This sparked the idea of crowdsourcing and Citizen Science. If you are curious about this, why not check out https://twitter.com/CitizenScience_ They are tweeting all sorts of info from crowdsourcing help to initiatives.
The first time I heard about Citizen Science is when I was looking through the Cancer Research website and found that I could help scientists analyse their data. It gives a straight insight into the not so glamourous life of a cancer researcher and shows you a side of their job which is very different from mixing two tubes of coloured liquids!:

Be a CRUK citizen science at http://www.clicktocure.net/

But there are other initiatives you can give a hand to:
Crowdcrafting is an online assistance in performing tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence such as image classification, transcription, geocoding and more!

Zooniverse is home to the internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects ranging from individual, serendipitous discoveries to those using classifications that depend on the input of everyone who's visited the site.

Sci Starter is a platform where you can help by recording the growth of your plants, the bees flights, etc...

Xperimental tribe is a web platform for gaming and social computation. It helps researchers to realize web games/experiments and it let people join, while enjoying, the scientific research.

Project Noah is a tool to explore and document wildlife and a platform to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere.

Project Noah

So, what do you think my Sexy Readers? Would you help funding an academic science project? Or be a citizen science?

See you Soon for more Sexy Science,