Are there "gig economy" resources in academic research? Are they fundable?

Question

In many fields of research, there are some tasks that are self-contained and could be done effectively by someone who is not a full time member of a research group, but has the required skill and background. The task may be time-sensitive but often everyone is already fully tasked.

One might call them part-time or contract or temporary post-docs.

There are plenty of situations I can think of where this might not work, or would be a bad idea, but perhaps there are cases where the benefits outweigh any potential academic risks. They might involve a side-project, or an early foray into a potentially interesting area where there is no current expertise or time for someone to start from zero even though things might not pan out.

Because this would not be an employee situation, work would have to be done off-site. It might involve reading, writing, searching, programming, thinking, checking for errors (grammatical, logical, arithmetic...), or other tasks that could be exchanged electronically, and where the results could be checked and confirmed afterward. (You wouldn't want you primary data analysis done for example by "someone on the internet"!)

However I've never really heard of such a thing except in special circumstances where the individual has a previous relationship with the research group, and even then it can be difficult to work out the proper monetary mechanisms with the university administration, or funding agencies. "Consultant fees" are not a common line-item in research proposals.

Are there situations where this is changing? Are there any examples of micro-grants to get small jobs done in non-standard ways such as this? Is there even some better vocabulary to use to describe this kind of arrangement than "gig-egonomy" jobs?

---

edit: Seeing some the comments below it struck me that this might not be a very popular concept among regular post-docs. I don't think this type of resource will ever put normal post-doc positions at significant risk. But here I'm just asking if it happens, how might it be funded, and what it might be called, not if it's a good idea.

Answer 1

I've seen this happen in a sort of temporary 'research assistant/intern' role. Normally there's data that needs to be crunched or transcriptions done and it works to have someone come in to do it whilst the main researchers are doing the actual analysis/research. These can be paid, but usually tend to be from a local university or similar.

For bigger projects, there are transcription and data services available online which can do large volumes of that sort of work for you, normally on a per page/per data set model.

I know you have explicitly said you don't want opinions on if it's a good idea, however I can't ever imagine many people wanting to farm parts of their research out to unknown people on the internet. The vast majority of research is sensitive either in terms of the raw data or in terms of the research goal. It would be too easy for someone to copy your work and beat you to the punch if you were working on something of interest. Therefore I can't really say how it might be funded or what it might be called, because I can't imagine it actually coming into fruition