Hi all,

My name is Sören Auer and I’m heading the Adaptive Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web research group at Universität Leipzig.

As a research project manager, reviewer, evaluator and project proposer I got quite some experiences with research funding from different perspectives and on different levels. I gained the impression that research is currently often not performed as efficient and beneficial as it could be. One reason for that from my point of view is the way research funding works today.

Together with colleagues we were working on a new model for research funding, which is based on creating an open prediction market for research ideas in order to identify the most promising approaches for funding. In such an open market stakeholders bet or vote about which research results benefit them most. The highest-ranked research ideas according to the stakeholder benefit should ultimately get funded. The market should be organised as a transparent Web platform incorporating semantic (for information integration) and social networking (for self-organising collaboration) techniques.

As a proof-of-concept we were developing with Cofundos.org a Web platform for open-source software R&D, which is already actively used and attracted wide attention. In order to advance this project towards the original aim of improving research funding we have set up a web site with further information about the envisioned Participative Research funding concept at:

http://wiki.cofundos.org

I would be very happy to receive your comments on the Participatory Research concept. I’m especially interested in views from different disciplines (e.g. Chemistry, Biology, Social Sciences etc.), since the Participatory Research concept is currently pretty much influenced by our Computer Science perspective.

Best,

Sören