NeuroDojo: With funding under assault, time to revisit science crowdfunding

31 January 2025

With funding under assault, time to revisit science crowdfunding

In the last two weeks, the new White House has thrown more monkey wrenches into the American scientific research machine than ever before. Grant money has been frozen, and a lot of people who were getting salaries from grants are facing rent day with no way to pay.

For everyone whose grant or pay is in limbo, I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this bullshit.

There’s a lot to unpack and I won’t try to do it all in this post. But the current crisis did make me think back a few years about science crowdfunding. In particular, I think I had a good point about the importance of diversifying your portfolio for research funding.

So I wrote a little thread on Bluesky suggesting that some scientists might consider what they could do with crowdfunding for research.

This blog post is also a good opportunity to point to this post on Southern Fried Science about Andrew Thaler’s experience with Patreon:

By just about any metric, the return on investment from Patreon exceeds, by an order of magnitude, just about an other funding I’ve received in the last decade. For most of us, we don’t need to move mountains, we just need the space to stop and breathe and create.

I’m under no illusions about what science crowdfunding can and cannot do. And it sucks that I have to bring it up because we are facing an all out attack on research funding. But times are what they are and we have to think in new ways to keep the gears turning.