Anatomy of the Crowd4Discovery crowdfunding campaign

Abstract

Crowdfunding allows the public to fund creative projects, including curiosity-driven scientific research. Last Fall, I was part of a team that raised $25,460 from an international coalition of "micropatrons" for an open, pharmacological research project called Crowd4Discovery. The goal of Crowd4Discovery is to determine the precise location of amphetamines inside mouse brain cells, and we are sharing the results of this project on the Internet as they trickle in. In this commentary, I will describe the genesis of Crowd4Discovery, our motivations for crowdfunding, an analysis of our fundraising data, and the nuts and bolts of running a crowdfunding campaign. Science crowdfunding is in its infancy but has already been successfully used by an array of scientists in academia and in the private sector as both a supplement and a substitute to grants. With traditional government sources of funding for basic scientific research contracting, an alternative model that couples fundraising and outreach - and in the process encourages more openness and accountability - may be increasingly attractive to researchers seeking to diversify their funding streams.

Figure 1

Plot of daily fundraising totals over the duration of the Crowd4Discovery campaign. The dashed line indicates idealized constant fundraising growth ($25,000/52 days).