Crowdsourcing is a means to raise funds through public contributions in a manner which allows a large number of small contributions to make a difference. Originally started in technology areas where considerable upfront capital was required to make the project viable, SciFund and Experiment.com have taken this into the research arena to allow small research projects to gain support. As those in research know, it is notoriously difficult to raise funds for small research projects and crowdsourcing provides that opportunity. As an example of how well it can work, Experiment has raised $600,000 over the last 4 years.

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