Crowdsourcing biomedical research: leveraging communities as innovation engines

Considerable resources are required to gain maximal insights into the diverse big data sets in biomedicine. In this Review, the authors discuss how crowdsourcing, in the form of collaborative competitions (known as Challenges), can engage the scientific community to provide the diverse expertise and methodological approaches that can robustly address some of the most pressing questions in genetics, genomics and biomedical sciences.