I love the concept: crowd-sourced research can provide an enormous amount of help to research groups barely clinging onto life (financially). However, there's a

I love the concept: crowd-sourced research can provide an enormous amount of help to research groups barely clinging onto life (financially). However, there's an enormous issue that also needs to be addressed: the impact of university affiliations on the results obtained. In an ideal world, crowd-funded research would lead to public domain research papers (no copyright) and inventions (no patents). Clearly, that's not the real world... More often than not, universities have air-tight intellectual property agreements with all professors and graduate students that grant all right, title, and interest in any inventions or discoveries back to that university. Effectively, it's this that enables major publishers to maintain their choke-hold on the industry.