25 fully funded projects! With two more projects being funded today, we have a full third of the projects that started this round of #SciFund that have met their funding goals (33%). As a reminder, we funded just a little over a fifth of the proposals in round 1 (20.4%).

Congratulations to our latest researchers making their goals are:

• How did those little guys get there?!? by Paul Durst
• Genopolitics: Your Genes Affect How You Vote! by Aleks Ksiazkiewicz

This round of #SciFund ends tomorrow, 31 May 2012. Please be aware that not all the projects end at the exactly the same time, so if there is a project that you’ve been thinking of supporting, don’t wait til the last second and be disappointed.

Please support projects that interest you. If you would like to be one to help make a scientist’s day by hitting the target, there are several projects that are more than 75% funded, including:

• Plants can talk – with help from technology by Cactus_Acoustics (Plants! Making sounds! How wild is that, people?) Funded!
• Are Coral Reefs Picky Eaters? by Sara Aubery (Beautiful oceans, people!)
• The Face of Pain by Simon van Rysewyk (You’ll wish you’d funded this project next time you have an accident, people!)
• The Effect of Water on Life by Anthony Salvagno (You drink this stuff, people!)
• Budding Scientists by Catherine Anderson (The next generation of science, people!)
• Renewable fatty alcohols from biodiesel by Peter Hsieh (Better living through chemistry, people!)
• As the Fur Flies: Tracking Fur Seals by Heather Liwanag (Fur seals, people. Adorable fur seals! Yeah, I’m not afraid to pull out the cute!)

A donation that pushes a project to 100% is a big deal, partly because scientists get a higher cut of the money raised when they make their targets than when they don’t.

A lot has been achieved in this last week. It’s exciting to see where we will end up at the end of the day tomorrow.

Winner's circle

I did not plan to be blogging here so much the last few days, but great news keeps happening. The last couple of hours has seen a surge of activity for #SciFund. with not one, not two, but three projects hit their funding goals!

Congrats to:

• “Seahorse Adventures” by Lindsay Aylesworth
• “No Bogs, No Bugs, No Plants, No People” by Kristina Summers
• “The Amphibian Ranavirus Project” by Tess Youker

They are projects 18 through 20 to be fully funded! We’ve now funded 26% of projects in this round (a better funding rate than the National Science Foundation last year).

You can, of course, support any project you like – including those that have already met their target. If you want to support a project, you should pick one you are genuinely interested in and believe in. That said, these projects that are now getting close and would certainly appreciate a little extra attention:

• “Confronting deforestation -northern Argentina” by Jennifer Romero: 89% done as of now.
• “The Face of Pain” by Simon van Rysewyk: 85% done.
• “Resurrection ecology” by Mary Rogalski: 83% done.

There are only a few days left to contribute. If you can’t fork out cash, you can still help the cause by spreading the word. Every project has a Facebook “Like” button and a “Tweet this” button. Press those buttons, people!

Update: Mary Rogalski’s “Resurrection Ecology” has become project #21 to join the winner’s circle!

Even more updating: Jennifer Romero’s “Confronting deforestation” is also complete, making it the fifth project completed today. 22 down; 29% of projects this round funded!

Photo by Karin Beil on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Milestone

This morning, round 2 of #SciFund passed the $80,000 mark for contributions.

Let’s do a quick review of where we are overall for both rounds of #SciFund.

• We’ve raised over $150,000 for original scientific research over both rounds… so far.
• We’ve fully funded 27 research projects… so far.
• Our rate of funding success is slightly higher than the National Institutes of Health last year, and is comparable to the National Science Foundation. You can see that data in Jai’s post on the Scientific American Guest Blog last week.

All of this is awesome and exciting. But increasingly, what I’m thinking about is not what the next four days will bring for the #SciFund participants, but what the next four years will bring.

The real accomplishment will be when those peer reviewed research papers come out that say in the Acknowledgements section, “This research supported by contributions to the #SciFund Challenge.” And then watching how those papers find their place in the scientific literature.

Many of our #SciFund participants are early career scientists, too: graduate students and postdocs and so on. I want to see how their #SciFund experience carries through their career path. I think it will be a plus for them, because it shows initiative and communication abilities.

Then there is the larger issue of how science crowdfunding will start to fit into the scientific ecosystem. We’ve learned in this past month that the first round of #SciFund was not a freak, fluke, happenstance, or  one-off. In a few years, it might be normal for some scientists to crowdfund their research.

It’s easy to track success during the crowdfunding process and feel the excitement. But science is about the hard yards and the long haul. That’s where the real achievement will begin.

Photo by Pete Reed on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.