Tag: Crowdfunding

How is Technology Changing Research? Let’s Find Out!

Alice Bonasio

SMW London badge v2

Social Media Week London will soon be upon us and Mendeley is really excited to be hosting a Masterclass in the heart of Covent Garden. This year’s SMW theme is “Open and Connected” and  that’s literally what Mendeley is all about. So we thought we’d bring together a few like-minded people to talk about how social media and technology are changing the way we research and what this means not only for the academic community, but for everybody.

Research is not about a “walled garden” any more. It’s global, open and collaborative (the fact that Mendeley just reached 2.5 million users proves that) If you’re a student, have a professional interest in science or academia, are one of the millions of people who have contributed in some way to a citizen science project or thought about supporting research through crowdfunding, then you’re part of this story. And if you aren’t yet, then chances are that you soon will be. People want to participate in science, creating communities around interesting projects and helping to advance the pace of discovery in the process, and now they can even do this by playing Facebook games.

The dynamic format of the event will have 9 high-profile international speakers presenting their ideas in 5-minute PechaKucha-style presentations followed by a 45-minute open discussion between the panellists and the audience (both in the venue and online) mediated by Nicolai Humphreys, Web Editor of the Lancet. We have a very impressive cross-section line-up, and they’ll explore, from a variety of angles, how technology and social media are enabling scientific research and making science more open for everyone. We will look at how games can leverage the brainpower of millions of citizen scientists, how crowdfunding initiatives have helped raise funds for finding new cures for cancer, and how global collaborative platforms are helping to bring together researchers to help solve some of the biggest problems facing us today.

The space in the venue is limited to only few guests and VIP pass holders, but we’ll be streaming everything live, so wherever you are in the world you can watch the sessions and send in your comments.

So if you have a question (whether it’s for on of the panelists or a general issue about technology and research you’d like to explore) get in touch via Twitter using the hashtag #smwSciTech or send an email to alice.bonasio@mendeley.com and we’ll try our best to include it!

See you there!

Event Details

Social Science Masterclass: How Technology is Changing Research

Thursday 26th September 2013

11:00am to 1:00pm

Covent Garden, London

Speakers:

Jan Reichelt, President and Co-Founder at Mendeley, dubbed the “Facebook for Scientists” – a collaboration platform with 2.5 million users worldwide that also offers researchers workflow and content management tools to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. In April 2013 Mendeley was acquired by Elsevier, one of the world’s largest scientific publishers

Nicolai Humphreys Web Editor, The Lancet, one the world’s best known, oldest and most respected medical journals, founded in 1823 and published by Elsevier since 1991

Rachel Greene – Director of Marketing at JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) the first peer-reviewed and internationally recognised Scientific Journal that uses video content

IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg Senior Vice President Journal and Content Technology at Elsevier . He heads the Article of the Future project, which is an initiative that looks at how the traditional paper/pdf based article will evolve to accommodate the wealth of multimedia content that researchers will increasingly rely upon to build scholarly conversation

Margaret Gold Director and Co-Founder of the Mobile Collective,which includes projects such as Citizen Cyberlab, looking to build tools and platforms for citizen science as well as collaborative environments and software tools that stimulate creative learning.

Emma Cooper, Business Development Director at Team Cooper, the developers of Facebook game Fraxinus which harnesses the power of citizen science to find a cure for ash dieback disease

Liz Wald, Head of International at Indiegogo, the largest crowdfunding platform on the web which has successfully enabled scientific research via projects such as uBiome and iCancer which raised funds as well as awareness through their highly successful campaigns.

Rayna Stamboliyska, Board Member of the Open Knowledge Foundation France, working at the Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity in Paris which focuses on open digital tools for science and has prototyped a platform for citizen science projects in synthetic biology.

Robert Simpson, Researcher and Developer at Zooniverse  (a platform that connects citizen scientists with projects they can contribute to)

 

Top Tips for Crowdfunding Your Research

Alice Bonasio

 

Crowdfunding for Research

We had a great response to our last blog post about crowdfunding for research, with lots of people joining our Mendeley Crowdfunding Group and emailing questions and comments.

So yesterday I joined a live Google Hangout with the folks from Indiegogo to try and answer some of those questions and also give some general guidelines about how to start a campaign to raise research funds through crowdfunding.

Breanna DiGiammarino, Educational Vertical Lead at Indiegogo, advised researchers to think about what audience their research speaks to, but also pointed out that you can often be surprised at how many people are interested in what might seem a very niche subject. Crowdfunding, she explains, reaches a wide global audience, and that reach can be much bigger than you expect.Read More »

Research Taps Into the Crowd

Alice Bonasio

Photograph by FlyingPete at Morguefile

There’s no denying that securing funding is a vital part of a researcher’s job. But although it has never been exactly easy to apply for and get money for scientific research, the on-going global economic crisis made things even more difficult, especially for early career researchers. Faced with cuts, universities and funding bodies have less money to distribute, and might opt for safer bets in established scientists and less experimental approaches and projects.

Maybe this is why we have seen a rise in the trend of crowdfunding research, where scientists – both in and around traditional institutions – have appealed to the wisdom (and pockets) of the crowd. And the crowd, it seems, is really eager to take a more active role in research, not only funding it but also participating through citizen science projects.

Microryza, a crowdfunding website launched in 2012, raised over $200,000 for about 80 projects (they operate an all-or-nothing model where backers only get charged if the campaign goal is reached). Those projects include creating an open synthetic biology lab in the cloud, Tracking Magellanic Penguins, an investigation into why jokes are funny, and research into whether nanobots can be used to detect and target cancer cells.

Indiegogo, the largest crowdfunding platform on the web, hosted some very successful projects such as uBiome (a citizen science project that aims to better understand the dozens of health conditions related to the bacteria in your body) and iCancer (a campaign that raised over £2 million to fund research into a potential treatment for neuroendocrine cancer)

At Mendeley, we thought that our community of nearly 2.5 million researchers would be interested in the new possibilities this type of funding could bring, so we started a Crowdfunding group and asked Indiegogo to advise any researchers who wanted to start their own campaigns into what they should do to maximise their chances of success. This is why on Tuesday the 27th August Alice Atkinson-Bonasio from Mendeley will join the experts at Indiegogo for one of their weekly sessions, which will be streamed live on YouTube.

This is where we’ll be talking about some of the most common questions researchers have around crowdfunding, such as what opportunities, there are, what successful campaigns have done, what research has been funded and what best practice is for reaching your target.

If you have any questions or comments about crowdfunding research, please join the Mendeley group, send a tweet to @alicebonasio using the hashtag #MendeleyCrowdfunding or post it on the comments here. You can also find us on both the Indiegogo and Mendeley Facebook pages.