Crowdsourcing in Science

Scientists have opened up their research, removing patents and relying on the crowd to help modify their data. The practice isn't new. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been crowdsourcing a distributed network of computers since the mid-90's to scan the skies for alien life. Today science is doing more than just using distributed computing, they are relying on a distributed network of citizen scientists to collect data and help refine their work.

Space

Anansi Spaceworks: "There are thousands of problems that need solving to make way for space colonization, and there's no one better suited or motivated to solve them than the people who want to go. Our job is to make that as easy as it can be!"

NASA's Stardust@Home: NASA has a long history of turning to its legion of amateur astronomers for help in processing raw data. This history -- which started in 2003 when NASA turned to an army of "clickworkers" to identify craters in the millions of images coming back from its Mars mission -- could well be its own article. The latest effort is Stardust@Home, a University of California at Berkeley project using volunteers to process images containing, yes, stardust. More info here.

Biology
Wired has written about opening biology studies to the crowd.

CAMBIA: The CAMBIA research institute has founded The Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS) and BIOForge -- "Our goal is to democratise problem solving to enable diverse solutions to problems through decentralised innovation."

The Christmas Bird Count: From the National Audobon Society, "It’s probably one of the longest-standing example of how large numbers of amateurs can collect widely dispersed data – in this case, all the birds they can spot in one of hundreds of designated areas around the country – that then can be assessed for trends by expert and amateur alike. For the ornithological community, it’s crowdsourcing at its best."

Climate

ClimatePrediction.Net used similar methods to the SETI project, relying on a distributed network of computers to crunch numbers on the future of global warming.

General

Science Commons: "Scientific inquiry is becoming more data-intensive in almost every discipline...Science Commons is an exploratory project to apply the philosophies and activities of Creative Commons in the realm of science.
Open Science: "Dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software."
Innocentive: Connecting researchers worldwide with the R&D needs of companies everywhere.
Public Library of Science: Changing the way academic science articles get published.