Has there been any successful examples of crowd funded academic research projects? (i.e., instead of grants from funding agencies)
I would restrict the scope of this question to only within academia.
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Sign up to join this communityTabby's star is a variable star that used Kickstarter to crowdfund the purchase of telescope time on Las Cumbres Observatory. The observations and many others concluded the mysterious variability was caused by dust extinction around the star.
crowd.science is a crowd-funding platform for academic research which includes a host of examples of crowd-funded academic projects. Notable recent projects include the funding of LSD brain imaging at Imperial College London.