News Brief: Enquiry.top Launches Community Research Bounties

Today, enquiry.top is excited to announce a pilot program that funds community-driven research bounties. The initiative aims to bridge curiosity and resources by enabling users to propose focused research questions, crowdsource investigative effort, and reward contributors. The pilot will run for three months and prioritize reproducible, open research projects.

What are research bounties?

Research bounties are targeted questions or investigations with a monetary or non-monetary reward. They help direct community attention to issues that require domain expertise, data analysis, or structured inquiry. Bounties may be proposed by individuals, institutions, or sponsors who want robust, publicly verifiable answers.

How the pilot works

Key elements of the pilot include:

• Proposal submission: Sponsors submit a research question with clear deliverables and criteria for success.
• Review and approval: A moderation panel checks feasibility, ethical considerations, and public interest.
• Work phase: Approved bounties are opened on the platform for contributors to join. Contributors must agree to data-use terms and provide reproducible artifacts (code, datasets, notebooks).
• Evaluation and reward: Submissions are evaluated against the criteria. Rewards can be cash, access to premium tools, or publication opportunities.

Example pilot bounties

Early examples include:

1. Quantify the open-source adoption trends of top web frameworks over the past 5 years.
2. Identify biases in publicly available housing datasets across three major metropolitan areas.
3. Reproduce and extend an influential preprint's main experiment with open data.

Ethics and governance

Enquiry.top will emphasize research ethics. Bounties involving human subjects, personal data, or potentially harmful outcomes will face stricter review and may require institutional review board (IRB) documentation. Sponsors and contributors must adhere to a code of conduct to foster constructive, respectful collaboration.

Why this matters

Open research bounties democratize access to funded inquiry. They enable independent researchers, students, and community scientists to tackle questions that might otherwise be overlooked. By requiring reproducible outputs, the program also helps build a public archive of high-quality research artifacts.

How to participate

Interested sponsors can submit proposals through the platform's bounty page. Contributors should create a profile, link relevant credentials or past work, and read the reproducibility checklist. The pilot will include webinars and onboarding sessions to help teams form around interesting questions.

Next steps

During the pilot, we'll publish monthly updates highlighting successful bounties and lessons learned. If the program meets community needs, we'll consider scaling up with institutional partners and additional funding models.

Want to get involved? Visit enquiry.top/bounties to learn more and sign up for the launch webinar.

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