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There are still and always will be ways that amateurs can add to the scientific community. It all comes down to the why that the astronomy profession works; there are considerably more data sets in the pipeline than there are telescopes to collect. There are some thing that just won't make it into that pipeline due to the cost outweighing the benefit.
A perfect example of this is with RR Lyrae stars (a variable star with less than 24 hour cycle) having a larger secondary cycle of 20-40 days. Studies like this consume a lot of time and to get anything real out of it you need to do this to multiple targets.
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