Jai Ranganathan

A few #SciFund people have told me that they have not been receiving my e-mails or notifications via the #SciFund e-mail list. If you applied for #SciFund but haven’t heard from me in the past week, please contact me immediately (contact info on About page).

Okay, on to the topic of this post: how do you figure out the right dollar target for your #SciFund crowdfunding project?

There actually is some thinking involved in getting to the answer. The first step is to talk about fees. The organizers of #SciFund aren’t making a penny off of this, but RocketHub does charge some fees. If you make or exceed your target, RocketHub keeps 8% of what you raise (4% going to credit card fees, 4% going to RocketHub). If you don’t hit your target, RocketHub charges 12% (4% going to credit card fees, 8% going to RocketHub). Additionally, for people not in the US and Canada, there is a bank wiring fee, which is 10-20 dollars, when RocketHub sends your money to you.

Jai Ranganathan

We are in the middle of the first week of project planning for the second round of #SciFund! Or as I like to call it, #SciFund Returns. Unfortunately, a few SciFunders have reported problems with not receiving my e-mails, so I am reposting the instructions for week one here.

To recap the basics of #SciFund, all projects will run from May 1 – May 31 on the crowdfunding platform RocketHub. April – this month – is when we all will be planning our crowdfunding projects. To make it simpler, we have broken down the month by week with specific tasks assigned to each week. Detailed task lists will be e-mailed to you at the beginning of each week.

Jai Ranganathan

The vast majority of scientists participating in the #SciFund Challenge are based at universities (and by the way scientists, sign up here for #SciFund). And for lots of reasons, the #SciFund money raised by those university-based scientists will likely need to be routed through their universities.

To avoid a million headaches, it is really important for #SciFund scientists to clear their crowdfunding campaigns with their local grants administrators before projects launch in May. As crowdfunding for science is so new, many university administrators will be totally unfamiliar with it and might well raise a host of objections.

Note from Jai. This post is by Kalani Kirk Hausman, one of the participants in the first round of the  #SciFund Challenge. You can see his #SciFund project here and you can find him on Twitter at @KKHausman.

While chasing crowd-funding support for the STEMulate Learning program during the initial #SciFund Challenge, I did not reach an ambitious funding goal for a full high-performance computing lab. At first read, this sounds like failure – but was not.

Jai Ranganathan

The second round of the #SciFund Challenge is open for business – sign up here!

So, Jarrett and I have been analyzing the data from the first round of #SciFund to determine the money patterns in science crowdfunding (check out Jarrett’s earlier posts here and here). This time, let’s drill down a bit to see what we can learn about those who contributed to #SciFund projects.

Jai Ranganathan

If you haven’t heard, the second round of the #SciFund Challenge just kicked off. If you are a scientist and are interesting in engaging the public with your science and raising money for your research along the way, you can sign up here.

Okay, on to the topic of this post. One of the changes for the second round of #SciFund is that we are adding a very mild review process for scientists that want to participate. What is this review process about? And why are we making this change in the first place? After all, isn’t crowdfunding all about the wisdom of crowds?

What’s the review about?

This new #SciFund review process is not the formal peer review process that scientists go through to get manuscripts published in scientific journals. I certainly don’t knock traditional peer review, as the process leads to much better science.