I received the following email:
Hello, my name is Lauren Schmidt, and I recently graduated from the Brain & Cognitive Sciences graduate program at MIT, where I spent a lot of time doing online research using human subjects. I also spent a lot of time being frustrated with the limitations of various existing online research tools. So now I am co-founding a start-up, HeadLamp Research, with the goal of making online experimental design and data collection as fast, easy, powerful, and painless as can be. But we need your help to come up with an online research tool that is as useful as possible!
We have a short survey (5-10 min) on your research practices and needs, and we would really appreciate your input if you are interested in online data collection.
I imagine they’re planning to make money off this start-up and so I think it would be only fair if they pay their survey participants. Perhaps they can give them a share of the profits, if any exist?
Thanks for posting this! We're really looking forward to getting feedback from as broad an audience of researchers as possible. We definitely are grateful for all the feedback we get from researchers; we plan to give survey participants early access and support when we launch.
Reminds me of those survey takers that call from banks. They want us to basically help them take more money from us.
If a company intends to profit off help from others (in this case survey takers), I definitely agree that they should be paying the participants.