Join the citizen science movement, where we are doing just that.

Scientific research has, up until recently, been conducted by pharmaceutical corporations, large institutions and researchers at universities. This makes research slow, expensive, and sometimes lacking relevance to society's real health concerns due to incentive structures around government/institutional research funding. Citizen science aims to change this, for the better of humanity. There is a small but growing community of people with no formal training in science who conduct scientific experiments that advance the rate of health research. Someday, a citizen scientist could be the discoverer of the cure for cancer. It could be done with less time and money than by bureaucratic institutions.

The problem citizen scientists are currently facing is credibility and validation from the traditional "powers that be." It is the only way the movement as a whole can progress forward.

To validate citizen science as a movement, we need to be publishing papers in recognized scientific journals, especially open-access journals which would allow anyone to learn more about citizen science. In this project, we have written an overview of citizen science health studies to be published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. This paper is important because it provides an overview of citizen science health efforts to date including studies from PatientsLikeMe, 23andMe, Quantified Self, Genomera, and DIYgenomics.

We need $1,990 in order to publish this paper in the journal (JMIR open-access fee description). Please join us in making a donation towards advancing the progress of scientific research!