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Comment by Blahah | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent news. I really look forward to seeing Experiment grow. These are two challenges I foresee...

1. At the moment, the people posting projects are mostly PhD students. This is excellent for PhD students, but the real challenge is getting more entrenched scientists to explore this new medium. I've seen a few professors, but not many. I'd love to know how Experiment are planning to engage the science community.

2. Currently it's only open to US scientists. This really sucks for the rest of us. A major potential benefit of this platform is to open up science to those in places where science funding is really bad, unlike the US where it's just not as good as it used to be, but is still tens of billions per year. Please fix this.

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Guessing you aren't seeing many professors since funding numbers are too low right now. Looks like biggest projects getting funded are ~$10K. Presumably that changes as it gets more popular.

yeah, most of these grants won't even cover a grad student for more than 3 months. Most professors are going to spend their time on NSF and NIH grants that will support multiple students for 5 years.

This is the big problem for me. Even a "hit" crowd funded project is a pretty tiny slice of a real grant, and still takes time and energy.

It is on the other hand great to let a PhD student get some funding for their work, pay for a field visit, etc. Crowd funding is a supplement to internal grants and pilot grants at this point, not the NIH/NSF lifeblood of most labs.

Don't administrative fees and tuition suck up a huge percent of grant money?

Could crowdfunding get so much more bang for the buck, as compared with traditional funding?

Yes they do, but I wonder if those still apply in this case or not. At the end of the day, it is still money coming into the university.

Edit: To answer my own question, funds are currently not subject to university overhead according to their FAQ.

The funds aren't currently subject to overhead according to the funder, but that seriously demotivates grant staff to shepherd a tiny little grant that isn't particularly helping.

That's what I meant by more trouble than it's worth. A staff member going "meh" can turn into a huge time sink.

It's not so much "fees" in the traditional sense. When a grant is awarded, a researcher is asking for what are known as "Direct Costs" - the costs of staff, certain types of equipment, reagents, patient recruitment, travel and publication fees, etc.

This is not how much money goes to the university. The university negotiates an overhead rate, which gets tacked onto the cost. This can often be more than half the cost of the grant. This helps cover indirect costs - the costs of administrative staff, copier paper, computing infrastructure, startup funds for new faculty, etc.

"More bang for the buck" assumes the researcher would get that overhead back for their own use. What actually happens is researchers get the same direct costs, the overhead % is zero, etc.

For minor grants, like where crowd funding is now, this isn't such a big deal. But if this somehow became the dominant paradigm, the overhead costs are going to have to come from somewhere...

Aren't a lot of University of Washington professors on there though?

Agreed! We've had so much demand for international projects, however we just can't handle it right now. This is on our horizon, and hopefully soon!

one day soon anyone anywhere in the world will be able to start an experiment on the site

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