Science Exchange (YC S11): A Central Database For Core Research Facilities
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Is that a design choice? Is there as much overlap as you think between your site and the one mentioned in the original post?
In some fields salaries might comprise the majority of lab costs but in biology this is not the case - experimental costs which can be spent as the researcher sees fit comprise the majority of costs. These costs can be outsourced to pay core facilities (currently $2B is spent outsourcing experiments to core facilities annually in the US).
While i agree that it is possible for researchers to establish where specialized equipment resides by reading papers and chatting with colleagues at conferences this is obviously inefficient and an incomplete record of potential providers. A centralized marketplace is a more efficient method for identifying providers.
That's spot on. Access to resources shouldn't be based on "special knowledge" Success in research should be a result of insights, creativity, and hard work, not "being in the know." Best of luck.
That highly depends on the field. At my university in the math department, you're completely right. In the physics department however, the costs of the machines and experimental setups dwarf the salaries. Because the demand for things is so low, the cost is ridiculously high. For example suppose there were no plastic coke bottles, but you require one for an experiment. How much do you think it costs to make one coke bottle in a university's workshop, or to order one from a specialized company? The costs can easily go in the thousands of dollars. That's the situation scientists are in for parts used in their setups, and for the machines they use. If you can share machines, that can be a huge cost savings.
Biocompare received the same reaction when they launched - "scientists like their distributors and the free swag they get", "they'll never order products themselves". Research is ready for a disruption.
edit as noted elsewhere, funding models also implicitly encourage this behavior
Are there currently any open projects or facilities renting themselves out?
(Their experiment might not reproduce your results. It happens!)
I've done scientific research, got published, so I saw this process first hand.
1) Grants are usually very small, only high end labs and a few science centers would do this (in my opinion).
2) Scientists are crazy about keeping their research private. There's a lot of competition and back stabbing going on in the scientific world.
3) Most scientists would find it very hard to rely on somebody they don't know. Experiments are extremely important, and often there's not much room for failure. Let's say you're a biologist who worked on a cell line for 3 years, and you finally have enough material to do an experiment. Would you ship it somewhere else to save some money?
4) Research projects that cannot be done locally are generally not approved. Meaning that the whole research project is financed and planned ahead of time. It's hard enough to get grant money, now imagine your proposed project has many more moving parts and points of failure.
Another point is that I've yet to see any core facilities that are running idle. Our core facility mass spec guys are running 24/7, and that's not even taking into account the time they lose to the instrument screwing up. In fact, it'll be hard to see some of the high end equipment running under heavier load – it's all just too fragile.
That said, I'm guessing this kind of service may be more appealing to fresh PhDs.
One of them is the classical scientific experiment, where you build an apparatus or somethings from dozens of components, and look at what results it produces. I can see how most of your concerns apply to that.
The other one is supplemental standard measurements, which can be also very expensive. For example if you create a new metal alloy, you might need an AFM image of the grain boundaries. If you receive such an image, you can very easily assess its quality, making it easier to rely on the "results" of others.
If you plan ahead, you can include a few thousand USD for AFM images in your grant application, much easier than getting a grant approved which includes buying your own AFM.