Speaker 1: Hi everyone, thanks for tuning in today. My name is Rachel Cates and I'm a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, and today I'm going to be talking a bit about some of the ethical issues in the world of academic crowdfunding. In this presentation I'm going to do a few things. First, I'm going to give a primer on crowdfunding and academic research and contextualize this trend in the open science movement. Then, I'm going to get into two of the key ethical issues I see arising with the growth of these platforms, namely trust and transparency. I'll conclude with some suggestions for how crowdfunding platforms can operate more ethically. Before I dive in though, a few quick points or disclaimers. One is that there's very little literature on this subject and almost nothing currently exists in terms of philosophical discussion about the ethical use and regulation of these platforms. And two, I will use the word experiment to refer to experiment.com, one of the bigger research crowdfunding sites. It's not the only one, but because of their size relative to other platforms, I focused my analysis on their conduct, policies, and so on. Now let's talk about experiment a little bit. Like entrepreneurial crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, or those more focused on emergency aid and fundraising like GoFundMe, anyone can technically launch or support a crowdfunding campaign. There is an approval process, so not every submitted proposal gets the go ahead for fundraising, but the site has a 47% success rate for those that are selected. Once a proposal is approved, people can start to contribute to the crowdfunding campaign. Experiment has some tips listed, and the limited literature also provides recommendations for involving researchers' professional and personal social networks. Currently, crowdfunding accounts for just a fraction of the total funded research in academia, broadly speaking. But if it continues to grow, and I think it will, I think it has the potential to upend how research is funded, how the public is involved in funding decision-making, and the course of research in a number of fields. I'd argue that this isn't the first time the world has seen this kind of shift in how research is done. I think some of the changes brought on by crowdfunding can be compared to the formation of the Royal Society of London and Francis Bacon's work, and more recently the open science movement of the 20th century. I think much of the ethos of open science is captured by sociologist of science Robert K. Merton's Four Norms for Conducting Scientific Research, often shortened to KUDOS and summarized on the slide here. These norms have, consciously or not, shaped much of the modern open science movement, which promotes an approach to research where data, code, methods, and materials may be shared with other researchers, and where findings are published in open access journals. I want to ground some of my ethical analysis in norms like Merton's, particularly communism and organized skepticism, and I'll call back to these ideas as we head into the ethical issues present in crowdfunding. The first of these issues that I want to talk about is accountability. Accountability is of vital importance in the maintenance of a positive relationship between researchers and the general public. A buzzword used in many sectors, the term has come to denote a recognition on the part of a party in a position of power that they owe certain conduct and honesty to their constituents or clientele, depending on the setting. Traditional funding agencies, so in Canada we have the Tri-Council, there's a funding body that distributes research funding to science, social science and humanities, and health research. So for those traditional funding agencies that provide funding from the government, they can use their application system to decide where to best allocate taxpayers money. Researchers who receive funding through this avenue are accountable to the agency that funds their research, and so they must comply with Tri-Council guidelines and are then bound by a commitment to use those funds appropriately, embody certain academic rigor in their work, and acknowledge conflicts of interest. While these researchers aren't in direct contact with the public, the expectations then laid out in, say, the Tri-Council's framework for responsible research exist in part to ensure that public funding is used appropriately. This infrastructure, however, does not exist for non-traditional funding avenues such as crowdfunding, and since there's no mechanism or structure for accountability built into the crowdfunding model, that burden then falls on researchers to initiate accountability through a different avenue, trust. To examine trust in this context, I wish to adopt Margaret Gilbert's description of a type of reciprocal relationship she calls joint commitment. Gilbert defines a joint commitment as one where multiple parties consciously and jointly enter into a specific state as a result of an agreement process. Unlike individual or personal commitments, Gilbert argues that joint commitments are a collaborative endeavor. Two or more parties co-create the commitment and no individual is independently responsible for any given aspect of it. This extends to the rescinding of a joint commitment as well. All involved parties must express a readiness to undertake such a commitment together. Gilbert argues that this is not limited to a single form. Parties can enter a joint commitment through a question and affirmative response, an open call for responses, and other scenarios that culminate in multiple parties affirming an intent to carry out a particular action together, broadly construed. Gilbert argues that parties have the grounds to make demands of one another to maintain the status of a joint commitment, and centers accountability as a key component of these commitments. Every party must be held accountable to every other party involved. And the interactions between experiment, researchers seeking financial support, and donors to crowdfunding campaigns are all parties involved in what I conceive of as a tripartite joint commitment, where the product of that commitment is the development or publishing of new research. And so this aligns with Mertonian communism, which describes scientific findings as the product of social collaboration and are assigned to the community. And so while the community in question is now certainly broader than when Merton was writing, this description still captures the spirit of both Merton's goals and those of crowdfunding platforms. When a researcher approaches experiment with her research project idea, she's implicitly asking, do you trust me and the research I hope to produce? And so this tripartite joint commitment is comprised of three components. First, the researcher has confirmed a particular research question or study with specific budgetary requirements in mind. Experiment has approved that proposal, and donors contribute to a campaign based on the information contained within it. Each party is accountable to every other party, and there's no way for their agreement to survive without the ongoing assent and participation of the researcher, experiment, and donors who support the project through the experiment funding page. Trust is a vital connection made between every party involved in crowdfunding research, and it must be understood as such. Onora O'Neill has written on the connection between trust and accountability on several occasions over the past two decades. In a 2018 paper on trust and trustworthiness, O'Neill explains that trust can be a valuable tool when placed in people, groups, or institutions worthy of that trust, but that can also be damaging to trusting individuals if their trust is misplaced and then put in untrustworthy groups. O'Neill is especially troubled by the eroding of traditional gatekeepers by the digital landscape, where it may be more difficult for individuals to discern whether their trust is well or misplaced. In a 2020 paper on digital media trust and accountability, O'Neill explores the nuances and changes in trustworthiness, accountability, and how we place trust in the 21st century. O'Neill argues that as media and journals increasingly move online, and the once clearly defined roles of editors, writers, and publishers follow suit, the old intermediaries, especially the printed word, are no longer as relevant as they once were. And this means that consumers, from crowdfunding contributors to bakers looking for a new cookie recipe like in the slide, may have a more difficult time discerning honest claims from fraudulent ones, and this has made the act of placing trust in people and institutions more complicated. The traditional intermediaries many are taught to look for when making decisions regarding trust aren't present in digital contexts, and the legal and regulatory standards of old intermediaries may not be as rigorous online. New intermediaries have replaced the old, including bloggers and social media influencers, data analysts, and other new-age experts, but often their authority lacks the formal credentials of what O'Neill refers to as those old intermediaries. Digital platforms allow for content creators to maintain a degree of anonymity in their posting, and this combined with the various ways that content can be presented or promoted to an audience can obfuscate the trustworthiness of that content. While O'Neill suggests the possibility of a new regulatory framework for digital content, she concludes that this will probably be a difficult, if not impossible, feat to accomplish. The general advice in the literature for researchers aiming to use a site-like experiment is to make use of personal networks such as friends and family when fundraising, presumably because there's already a trusting relationship that was built outside the context of a financial transaction. The minimal existing literature suggests that researchers develop a core set of supporters whose support will convey to other potential donors that the researchers in question can be trusted, which is similar to what happens during entrepreneurial startup funding procedures. In one of the existing guides on academic crowdfunding, the writers also stress that precision in describing the use of funds will also demonstrate trustworthiness. And yeah, these are both good, valid pieces of advice to give researchers, but I counter that with decent writing skills, it would certainly be possible to fool less research savvy donors into supporting a less trustworthy project. Precise wording alone is insufficient for the creation of a trusting relationship, especially a financial one between strangers facilitated by the internet. So what's a researcher to do? There are complications in building a trustworthy campaign and online persona as a researcher, and many considerations of what is an attractive project that governing bodies and donors alike will feel they can trust. So how can crowdfunding platforms facilitate an environment in which donors can hold researchers accountable to their research goals and use of funding? I think the answer may lie in greater transparency, but as I'm about to show, that's also a problem for these platforms. Most crowdfunding platforms give users the option to post updates about their campaign even after a project has successfully met its goal, and Experiment has no exception on this front. The platform actually encourages researchers to post consistent lab notes as a way to entice people to donate during the funding campaign, and to keep donors updated on any progress or stumbling blocks they may encounter after they've secured funding. Experiment's guide for researchers suggests one or two lab notes per week during the funding campaign, with a reduction to once a week once funding has been secured. Experiment asks for one to three project updates on project pages lab notes to keep contributors updated on how funding is being used, but according to a representative from the platform who I talked to, there's currently no method in place to follow up with researchers or ensure that these notes are posted. The goal of these updates is seemingly to create a mechanism of accountability, or as O'Neill puts it, a new intermediary to gatekeep the information being distributed by the researchers on their page, but the result is an unregulated framework that is not currently implemented evenly across the platform, and a shortcoming of the crowdfunding model that jeopardizes the trust necessary to facilitate that tripartite joint commitment between the researchers, Experiment, and donors. Presumably, researchers who use platforms like Experiment are either a. inherently excited about the use of crowdfunding to support their research, or b. somewhat reluctant to use crowdfunding but eager to secure financial support. And so I'm making the assumption here that an insignificant number of researchers using these sites are openly hostile to the idea of open access research and crowdfunding, given that there are enough skills and tasks associated with crowdfunding. So if a researcher doesn't fall into the A camp, they kind of by necessity have to fall into the B camp, if only due to the amount of work required to launch and sustain a crowdfunding campaign. And so despite Experiment's encouragement that researchers update their audience at least once a week, those researchers squarely in the B camp may be less enthusiastic about the prospect of writing lab notes. What encourages a researcher to spend time each week writing an update about their project for their supporters? Donations through Experiment are non-refundable, which means that they can't be returned once payment has been processed. So this means that if a researcher's project is successfully funded, the status of their funding is not contingent on their continued interaction with donors. So while Gilbert's theory of joint commitment can be used to demonstrate the ideal form of the relationship

Speaker 2: between all the parties here, reality may not always reflect this theoretical ideal. A scan of the funded project tabs on Experiment illustrates this, notably

Speaker 1: because there's tremendous variety in the number of lab notes published by each project's research team. Some projects that received thousands of dollars and received over a hundred percent of their funding goal have only posted a singular lab note, often one that predates the project receiving its funding. Others however have posted over ten lab notes, aligning much more closely with the suggestion made by Experiment. So although the site recommends a certain course of action for researchers, suggestion is not mandate nor lab notes a necessary component of the joint commitment as it stands right now. And so in order to enforce greater transparency from researchers, Experiment must build the upkeep of lab notes into their demands of researchers when making that joint commitment. Then, if researchers fail to update their supporters via lab notes, both donors and Experiment are in the position to demand that those updates occur in accordance with Gilbert's model. A more explicit breakdown of the types of projects that get funded, along with measures put in place to ensure that researchers can be held fully accountable for the use of money they raise and the research goals they have in mind, might be helpful. But...

Speaker 2: There is still some ambiguity on this front, and I'll demonstrate this with a

Speaker 1: bit of an example here. So Experiment allows for projects to be funded beyond a hundred percent of a funding goal. In the event that this occurs, Experiment allows teams to add stretch goals, which are a common tool used on many crowd funding platforms, to allow those seeking funding to raise more money than the safe amount agreed upon at the beginning of the crowdfunding campaign. So Experiment generally operates on an all-or-nothing framework, meaning that researchers don't receive any money if their project doesn't meet a hundred percent of its goal. But once funding surpasses a hundred percent of the funds requested, recipients can keep anything extra that is also raised. So researchers are obliged to include a budget breakdown of their project when they launch a campaign, as seen in the screenshot on the right. But this appears to only pertain to the initial funding goal. Researchers whose campaigns surpass their funding goal don't need to publicly account for the extra money they receive. And so the screenshot on the left pertains to the same project as the budget breakdown on the right, and so you can see that there's, you know, $637 that's unaccounted for here. So without adequate transparency measures in place, there's no way for researchers to demonstrate to members of the public who contributed to their campaign what that money is going to be used for. And so while one can make the argument that once funding has been received, it's the researchers' money to use, any major deviation in budget and project focus would violate the standing joint commitment between the researchers, contributors, and experiment. And so if experiment has not facilitated a way for researchers to account for budgetary changes or stretch goals in their budget, their system is neither transparent nor able to accommodate accountability, and thus they have not fulfilled their component of the joint commitment and could lose the trust of donors, who may use the fact that project proposals have been vetted by the platform staff as a sign that a given project is trustworthy. As O'Neill has argued, traditional, in this case academic, intermediaries are no longer as relevant here, and their digital replacements, that is to say crowdfunding, cannot be disciplined or held accountable themselves in the same way. As the party with the most organizational power in this arrangement, that's a problem, and experiment must facilitate a shift in accountability and transparency within its own platform. Currently, experiment is in a state where taking the initiative to become more transparent, trustworthy, and a modern institution can transform it into a truly powerful tool for funding, and endorsing future projects from younger researchers in particular. To wrap this up, I want to reassert that I'm not against the use of crowdfunding for research. I think it's an incredibly promising platform that can represent real change for grad students and junior faculty in particular. But there are some glaring ethical issues and burdens placed on researchers that shouldn't be ignored, and I've touched on just a few of them here, but as this was part of my master's thesis, I am definitely able to go into more detail if other people are interested. And a lot of these issues can in fact be resolved through more transparent functioning of these sites, and I hope the ethics literature on this subject continues to grow at the same pace as this new funding avenue. Thank you so much for your time and attention today. I would be delighted to be able to talk about this further, and you can either reach out to me in the comments section here, or via email, or even via Twitter, which is more professional than I promise my username suggests, because I would love to talk about this more. Thank you so much.