I'd be interested to see how much traction Science Exchange[1] is going to get. As someone who grew up in a family of scientists and who has been involved in the scientific community for a long time, I've got to say, my gut reaction is revulsion at the whole concept. Outsourcing experiments to the cheapest bidder? 99designs for science? I feel a really powerful revulsion.
I can't see any of the many scientists I know outsourcing their work. It beats the point! Maybe for the corporate science industry -- where they just need to perform certain tests as cheaply and quickly as possible, and with a preferred result if possible -- it could gain some traction. But I don't see this gaining anything in the universities. Or rather, perhaps I hope it doesn't.
Academic researchers already outsource about 2% of their experiments.
It's not driven by laziness, but by one institution having facilities or expertise that another doesn't. Often it's simply a way for universities to share machines so expensive that they can't all afford one of their own.
When I've encountered that sort of outsourcing in the past it was called "collaboration" and it was between two individual researchers at the respective institutions. There was no exchange of money and they would both have their names on any resulting papers.
This strikes me as much more "outsource the labor to where it's cheap" sort of thing. The programming team in India if you will.
All of that said, I'm not a researcher, so I suppose I'm not really the target audience. My experience of research is all second hand, though there's a lot of that. Maybe times have changed. I'll bring up the idea with my researcher friends and see what they think.
Comments
I'd be interested to see how much traction Science Exchange[1] is going to get. As someone who grew up in a family of scientists and who has been involved in the scientific community for a long time, I've got to say, my gut reaction is revulsion at the whole concept. Outsourcing experiments to the cheapest bidder? 99designs for science? I feel a really powerful revulsion.
I can't see any of the many scientists I know outsourcing their work. It beats the point! Maybe for the corporate science industry -- where they just need to perform certain tests as cheaply and quickly as possible, and with a preferred result if possible -- it could gain some traction. But I don't see this gaining anything in the universities. Or rather, perhaps I hope it doesn't.
[1] http://scienceexchange.com/
Academic researchers already outsource about 2% of their experiments.
It's not driven by laziness, but by one institution having facilities or expertise that another doesn't. Often it's simply a way for universities to share machines so expensive that they can't all afford one of their own.
When I've encountered that sort of outsourcing in the past it was called "collaboration" and it was between two individual researchers at the respective institutions. There was no exchange of money and they would both have their names on any resulting papers.
This strikes me as much more "outsource the labor to where it's cheap" sort of thing. The programming team in India if you will.
All of that said, I'm not a researcher, so I suppose I'm not really the target audience. My experience of research is all second hand, though there's a lot of that. Maybe times have changed. I'll bring up the idea with my researcher friends and see what they think.