There are very few scientific endeavors where amateurs regularly make serious contributions - astronomy is an important exception and important collaborations seem to be on the rise.
In addition to a problem space where amateurs can thrive a real issue is the transparency of results. Many areas of science tend to be quite defensive with their data until publication and even then, working with the data is often a daunting task.
So the Fermilab D0 collaboration (one of the founders was my thesis advisor) has done something rather dramatic by building a general interface to D0 event data. Specifically
This public web interface allows anyone to search several subsets of D0 Run I data involving high transverse momentum electrons, muons, jets and missing transverse momentum. Proposed signals from new physics can either be generated inside Quaero by giving control cards to the PYTHIA Monte Carlo generator, or submitted in the form of a file of event four-momentum vectors for the new physics signal. The Quaero program smears the signal event
objects as appropriate for the D0 detector resolutions, finds the optimum region in a space of a few defined variables, and compares the expected background in that region with the number of events observed in the data. Cross-section limits (or signal cross-sections in the case of an observed excess over background) are returned to the submitter by e-mail. D0 will monitor submissions to ensure the validity of the background estimates and of the programming; the submitter is expected to take scientific responsibility for the results, and is free to publish the results with citation of the
Quaero publication.
While it is unlikely that real amatuers will take advantage of this development (if you are really interested this seems like a good place to start), there are many areas of science that are becoming increasingly cross disciplinary. Transparency like this encourages new, and potentially powerful, collaborations - I would think dark matter searches would be great candidates (most of the experiments are relatively simple and many non-specialists could participate).
It is also true that the tech meltdown put many industrial physicists on the street. Perhaps we'll see collaborations of physicists who were let go by Bell Labs, AT&T Labs and IBM Research.
6:20:33 AM 
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