BBSRC turns to crowdsourced research

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council has launched a call for research projects that rely on people and computers outside the project team.

Up to £2 million is available for projects that generate data by developing software for crowdsourcing, or organising and conducting the research through people beyond the project.

A BBSRC statement said: “In recent years crowd sourcing has been deployed to tackle complex problems and to build research community resources. Examples have seen crowd sourcing use to re-design a protein, perform microscopic analysis of biomedical samples and even search for molecules that could make cancer treatment candidates.”