Outsourcing Can Transform Scientific Research

Extracted 17NOV2011 from http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/08/15/how-outsourcing-wil...

[Dr. Elizabeth Irons shares her experiences and frustrations, and those of many other individuals and organizations, in crossing the boundaries of scientific disciplines to access the diversity of scientific talent that is relevant to needs and initiatives in the wild. See excerpt below for her conclusion about how to address this problem.]

Outsourcing revolutionized the IT industry in the 1990s and 2000s and I believe outsourcing has the potential to revolutionize scientific research in the same way. But currently outsourcing in science is extremely difficult. It’s hard to find providers, time consuming to communicate with them, hard to evaluate them and hard to pay them. Other industries have solved these barriers by creating a marketplace.

I decided to do the same for science by creating a marketplace for outsourcing scientific experiments: ScienceExchange.com (Twitter). Science Exchange makes outsourcing easy – we have just launched and are now looking to help more researchers find and collaborate with relevant researchers. Just think of how many more discoveries can be made when scientists are able to easily tap into the best resources.