Open Genius Project

What is Open Genius?

Science is the main driver of innovation, economic development and social wealth.

However, because of the economic crisis, Western countries are cutting their research budget.

Our mission is to connect people and researchers, for the sake of alleviating academic poverty.

The idea is simple: we want to make qualitative research projects available to public and facilitate the funding through a global and highly motivated community [Gaggioli, A, Riva, G. (2008) Working the Crowd, Science 321, 5895, 1443].

We believe that crowdfunding is not just a recent trend, but represents a powerful channel with engaged communities capable to generate a critical mass of economic resources with the scope to source science projects.

Although there are different initiatives promoting crowd-funding in science, they share common objectives:

to increase the resources for research
to reduce the gap between science and the public
to enhance transparency in funding allocation and use
to inform donors about the results of their investments

Since these are widely-recognized objectives in the research community, we want to develop a unique crowd-funding platform for science, built collaboratively using open-source software.

More to explore?

Read the article Citizen Science published on Nature Neuroscience (note: registration is required to access the full text)
Read the article by Margareta Pagano on The Independent
Read the article by Leila Sattary on Chemestry Word
Read the article by Carmen Drahl on Chemical & Engineering News
Read the article on Michael Nestor's blog about financing science through microfinance

References

Glaeser, E.L. and A. Shleifer (2001). Not-for-Profit Entrepeneurs. Journal of Public Economics 81, pp. 99-115.
Howe, J (2008). Crowdsourcing. Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving Future of Business. New York, Three Rivers Press.
Lambert, T. and Schwienbacher, A. (2010) An Empirical Analysis of Crowdfunding. Social Science Research Network, March.
Wojciechowski, A. (2009). Models of Charity Donations and Project Funding in Social Networks. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5872, pp. 454-463.

Open Genius Project by Andrea Gaggioli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Unported License.

Open Genius Project	Search this site