Open science (also known as open research) is the movement to make scientific research, including publications, data, physical samples, software, and models, transparent and accessible to all levels of society through collaborative networks. This encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science (such as openly sharing data and code), broader dissemination and public engagement in science, and generally making it easier to publish, access, and communicate scientific knowledge.
Usage of the term varies substantially across disciplines, with a notable prevalence in the STEM
disciplines. The term 'open research' has gained currency as a broader
alternative to 'open science,' encompassing the humanities and arts
alongside traditional scientific disciplines. The primary focus
connecting all disciplines is the widespread uptake of new technologies
and tools, and the underlying ecology of the production, dissemination
and reception of knowledge from a research-based point-of-view. The term 'open scholarship'
has also been proposed to include research from the arts and humanities
as well as the different roles and practices that researchers perform
as educators and communicators.
Open science can be seen as continuing, rather than revolutionizing, practices that began in the 17th century with the academic journal, which enabled scientists to share resources in response to growing societal demand for scientific knowledge. The Open Science movement emerged primarily from tensions within
science between professional ethical codes prescribing transparency and
collaborativeness on the one hand and competitive pressures leading to a
focus on research article output and the exclusive handling of research on the other. Institutional interests to protect proprietary information for profit added to the latter.
Principles
Open science elements based on UNESCO presentation of 17February 2021. This depiction includes indigenous science.
The scientific research process is characterized by a series of
activities, including the collection, analysis, publication,
re-analysis, critique, and reuse of data. A number of barriers have been
identified by proponents of open science that impede or dissuade the
broad dissemination of scientific data. These include financial paywalls
of for-profit research publishers, restrictions on usage applied by
publishers of data, poor formatting of data or use of proprietary
software that makes it difficult to re-purpose, and cultural reluctance
to publish data for fears of losing control of how the information is
used.
According to the FOSTER taxonomy, open science can often include aspects of open access, open data, and the open-source movement. However, modern scientific research requires software for data and information processing. Additionally, open research computation addresses the problem of reproducibility of scientific results.
Types
The term 'open science' lacks a single standardized definition or
measurement framework. On the one hand, it has been referred to as a
"puzzling phenomenon". On the other hand, the term has been used to encapsulate a series of
principles that aim to foster scientific growth and its complementary
access to the public. Sociologists Benedikt Fecher and Sascha Friesike
have categorized Open Science into five schools of thought, each
emphasizing different aspects of the movement.
According to Fecher and Friesike 'Open Science' encompasses
diverse perspectives on how knowledge is created and shared. Fecher and
Friesike identify five distinct schools of Open Science, each reflecting
different priorities and approaches to the movement:
Infrastructure School
The infrastructure school views efficient research as dependent on
openly available platforms, tools, and applications. It regards open
science primarily as a technological challenge, focusing on
internet-based infrastructure including software, applications, and
computing networks. The infrastructure school is tied closely with the
notion of "cyberscience", which describes the trend of applying
information and communication technologies to scientific research, which
has led to an amicable development of the infrastructure school.
Specific elements of this prosperity include increasing collaboration
and interaction between scientists, as well as the development of
"open-source science" practices. The sociologists discuss two central
trends in the infrastructure school:
1. Distributed computing:
This trend encapsulates practices that outsource complex, process-heavy
scientific computing to a network of volunteer computers around the
world. The examples that the sociologists cite in their paper is that
of the Open Science Grid,
which enables the development of large-scale projects that require
high-volume data management and processing, which is accomplished
through a distributed computer network. Moreover, the grid provides the
necessary tools that the scientists can use to facilitate this process.
2. Social and Collaboration Networks of Scientists: This trend
encapsulates the development of software that makes interaction with
other researchers and scientific collaborations much easier than
traditional, non-digital practices. This trend emphasizes social media
platforms and collaborative digital tools to enable research
communication and coordination. De Roure and colleagues (2008) identify four key SVRE capabilities:
Managing and sharing research objects (reusable digital commodities)
Built-in incentives for making research objects available
Openness and extensibility for integrating diverse digital artifacts
Actionable functionality enabling active research use, not just storage.
The measurement school focuses on developing alternative methods to determine scientific impact, recognizing its crucial role in researchers' reputations, funding,
and careers. The authors then discuss other research indicating support
for the measurement school. The three key currents of previous
literature discussed by the authors are:
Peer review is widely acknowledged as time-consuming.
Citation impact, attributed to the authors, correlates more closely with journal circulation than with article quality.
Open Science–aligned publishing formats rarely conform to traditional journal structures that calculate impact factors.
Hence, this school argues that there are faster impact measurement
technologies that can account for a range of publication types as well
as social media web coverage of a scientific contribution to arrive at a
complete evaluation of how impactful the science contribution was. The
gist of the argument for this school is that hidden uses like reading,
bookmarking, sharing, discussing and rating are traceable activities,
and these traces can and should be used to develop a newer measure of
scientific impact. The umbrella jargon for this new type of impact
measurements is called altmetrics, coined in a 2011 article by Priem et
al., (2011). Markedly, the authors discuss evidence that altmetrics differ from traditional webometrics
which are slow and unstructured. Altmetrics are proposed to rely upon a
greater set of measures that account for tweets, blogs, discussions,
and bookmarks. Scholars propose that altmetrics should capture the
entire research lifecycle, including collaboration patterns, to produce
comprehensive impact measures. However, the authors are explicit in
their assessment that few papers offer methodological details as to how
to accomplish this. The authors use this and the general dearth of
evidence to conclude that research in the area of altmetrics is still in
its infancy.
Public School
According to the authors, the central concern of the school is to
make science accessible to a wider audience. The inherent assumption of
this school, as described by the authors, is that the newer
communication technologies such as Web 2.0
allow scientists to open up the research process and also allow
scientist to better prepare their "products of research" for interested
non-experts. Hence, the school is characterized by two broad streams:
one argues for the access of the research process to the masses, whereas
the other argues for increased access to the scientific product to the
public.
Accessibility to the Research Process: Communication technology
allows not only for the constant documentation of research but also
promotes the inclusion of many different external individuals in the
process itself. The authors cite citizen science
– the participation of non-scientists and amateurs in research. The
authors discuss instances in which gaming tools allow scientists to
harness the brain power of a volunteer workforce to run through several
permutations of protein-folded structures. This allows for scientists to
eliminate many more plausible protein structures while also "enriching"
the citizens about science. The authors also discuss a common criticism
of this approach: the amateur nature of the participants threatens to
pervade the scientific rigor of experimentation.
Comprehensibility of the Research Result: This stream of research
concerns itself with making research understandable for a wider
audience. The authors describe a host of authors that promote the use of
specific tools for scientific communication, such as microblogging
services, to direct users to relevant literature. The authors claim that
this school proposes that it is the obligation of every researcher to
make their research accessible to the public. The authors then proceed
to discuss if there is an emerging market for brokers and mediators of
knowledge that is otherwise too complicated for the public to grasp.
Democratic school
The democratic school focuses on public access to research products
(publications and data) rather than research processes or
comprehensibility. The central concern of the school is with the legal
and other obstacles that hinder the access of research publications and
scientific data to the public. Proponents assert that any research
product should be freely available. and that everyone has the same,
equal right of access to knowledge, especially in the instances of
state-funded experiments and data. Two central currents characterize
this school: Open Access and Open Data.
Open Data:
Opposition to the notion that publishing journals should claim
copyright over experimental data, which prevents the re-use of data and
therefore lowers the overall efficiency of science in general. The claim
is that journals have no use of the experimental data and that allowing
other researchers to use this data will be fruitful. Despite open data
advocacy, only 25 percent of researchers actively share their datasets,
citing the administrative burden as a primary obstacle.
Open Access
to Research Publication: According to this school, there is a gap
between the creation and sharing of knowledge. Proponents argue that
even though scientific knowledge doubles every 5 years, access to this
knowledge remains limited. These proponents consider access to knowledge
as a necessity for human development, especially in the economic sense.
Pragmatic School
The pragmatic school considers Open Science as the possibility to
make knowledge creation and dissemination more efficient by increasing
the collaboration throughout the research process. Proponents of the
Pragmatic School argue that science becomes more efficient when research
stages are conducted transparently and researchers share intermediate
results across institutions. 'Open' in this sense follows very much the
concept of open innovation. Take for instance transfers the outside-in (including external
knowledge in the production process) and inside-out (spillovers from the
formerly closed production process) principles to science. Web 2.0 is considered a set of helpful tools that can foster collaboration (sometimes also referred to as Science 2.0). Further, citizen science is seen as a form of collaboration that includes knowledge and information from non-scientists. Fecher and Friesike describe data sharing
as an example of the pragmatic school as it enables researchers to use
other researchers' data to pursue new research questions or to conduct
data-driven replications.
History
The widespread adoption of the institution of the scientific journal
marks the beginning of the modern concept of open science. Before this
time societies pressured scientists into secretive behaviors.
Before journals
Before the advent of scientific journals, scientists had little to gain and much to lose by publicizing scientific discoveries. Many scientists, including Galileo, Kepler, Isaac Newton, Christiaan Huygens, and Robert Hooke,
made claim to their discoveries by describing them in papers coded in
anagrams or cyphers and then distributing the coded text. Their intent was to develop their discovery into something off which
they could profit, then reveal their discovery to prove ownership when
they were prepared to make a claim on it.
The system of not publicizing discoveries caused problems because
discoveries were not shared quickly and because it sometimes was
difficult for the discoverer to prove priority. Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both claimed priority in discovering calculus. Newton said that he wrote about calculus in the 1660s and 1670s, but did not publish until 1693. Leibniz published "Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis",
a treatise on calculus, in 1684. Debates over priority are inherent in
systems where science is not published openly, and this was problematic
for scientists who wanted to benefit from priority.
Under aristocratic patronage,
scientists received funding to develop useful innovations or provide
entertainment, creating pressure to satisfy patrons' desires and
limiting open research that might benefit others.
Emergence of academies and journals
Eventually the individual patronage system ceased to provide the scientific output which society began to demand. Single patrons could not sufficiently fund scientists, who had unstable careers and needed consistent funding. The development which changed this was a trend to pool research by
multiple scientists into an academy funded by multiple patrons. In 1660 England established the Royal Society and in 1666 the French established the French Academy of Sciences. Between the 1660s and 1793, governments gave official recognition to 70
other scientific organizations modeled after those two academies. In 1665, Henry Oldenburg became the editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first academic journal devoted to science, and the foundation for the growth of scientific publishing. By 1699 there were 30 scientific journals; by 1790 there were 1052. Since then publishing has expanded at even greater rates.
Popular Science Writing
The first popular science periodical of its kind was published in
1872, under a suggestive name that is still a modern portal for the
offering science journalism: Popular Science. The magazine claims to have documented the invention of the telephone,
the phonograph, the electric light and the onset of automobile
technology. The magazine goes so far as to claim that the "history of
Popular Science is a true reflection of humankind's progress over the
past 129+ years". Scholarly discussions of popular science frequently reference the
concept of a 'science boom,' a period of rapid public interest in
scientific topics. A recent historiographic account of popular science
traces mentions of the term "science boom" to Daniel Greenberg's Science
and Government Reports in 1979 which posited that "Scientific magazines
are bursting out all over. Similarly, this account discusses the
publication Time, and its cover story of Carl Sagan in 1980 as
propagating the claim that popular science has "turned into enthusiasm". Crucially, this secondary account asks the important question as to
what was considered as popular "science" to begin with. Historians must
first clarify what constituted scientific expertise before analyzing how
popular writing bridged the gap between scientists and general
audiences.
Collaboration among academies
In modern times many academies have pressured researchers at publicly
funded universities and research institutions to engage in a mix of
sharing research and making some technological developments proprietary. Some research has commercial potential. Hoping to capitalize on it,
many institutions restrict access to information and technology, thereby
slowing scientific progress that might otherwise benefit from wider
collaboration. While predicting the commercial value of research is difficult, there
is consensus that the benefits to a single institution of proprietary
control are outweighed by the collective costs to the broader research
enterprise.
Coining of term "Open Science"
Steve Mann claimed to have coined the term "Open Science" in 1998. He also registered the domain names openscience.com and openscience.org in 1998, which he sold to degruyter.com in 2011.The term was previously used in a manner that refers to today's 'open science' norms by Daryl E. Chubin in his 1985 essay "Open Science and Closed Science: Tradeoffs in a Democracy". Chubin's essay cited Robert K. Merton's 1942 proposal of what we now refer to as Mertonian Norms for ideal science practices and scientific modes of communication. The term appeared intermittently throughout 1970s and 1980s academic
literature, where it was applied to a diverse range of concepts.
Internet and the free access to scientific documents
The open science movement, as presented in activist and institutional
discourses at the beginning of the 21st century, refers to different
ways of opening up science, especially in the Internet age. Its first pillar is free access to scientific publications.
This issue entered the political landscape when the Budapest Open
Access Initiative was released February 14, 2002, following a conference
organized by the Open Society Institute (now Open Society Foundations)
on December 1–2, 2001. The resulting declaration calls for the use of
digital tools such as open archives and open access journals, free of
charge for the reader.
The idea of open access to scientific publications quickly became
inseparable from the question of free licenses to guarantee the right
to disseminate and possibly modify shared documents, such as the Creative Commons
licenses, created in 2002. In 2011, a new text from the Budapest Open
Initiative explicitly refers to the relevance of the CC-BY license to
guarantee free dissemination and not only free access to a scientific
document.
Beyond publications, the open access principle has expanded to
include research data — the empirical foundation of scientific studies
across disciplines, as mentioned already in the Berlin Declaration in 2003. In 2007, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) published a report on access to publicly funded research data,
in which it defined it as the data that validates research results.
Beyond its democratic virtues, open science aims to respond to
the replication crisis of research results, notably through the
generalization of the opening of data or source code used to produce them or through the dissemination of methodological articles.
The open science movement inspired several regulatory and legislative measures. Thus, in 2007, the University of Liège
adopted a mandate requiring deposit of researchers' publications in its
institutional repository, Orbi, which launched in November 2008. In 2008, through the Consolidated Appropriations Act, the NIH Public Access Policy was made mandatory (previously voluntary since 2004). In France, the law for a digital Republic
enacted in 2016 creates the right to deposit the validated manuscript
of a scientific article in an open archive, with an embargo period
following the date of publication in the journal. The law also creates
the principle of reuse of public data by default.
Politics
In many countries, governments fund some science research. Scientists
often publish the results of their research by writing articles and
donating them to be published in scholarly journals, which frequently
are commercial. Public entities such as universities and libraries
subscribe to these journals. Michael Eisen, a founder of the Public Library of Science,
has described this system by saying that "taxpayers who already paid
for the research would have to pay again to read the results."
In December 2011, some United States legislators introduced a bill called the Research Works Act, which would prohibit federal agencies from issuing grants with any
provision requiring that articles reporting on taxpayer-funded research
be published for free to the public online. Darrell Issa,
a co-sponsor of the bill, explained the bill by saying that "Publicly
funded research is and must continue to be absolutely available to the
public. We must also protect the value added to publicly funded research
by the private sector and ensure that there is still an active
commercial and non-profit research community." In response, researchers organized widespread protests, including a boycott of the commercial publisher Elsevier called The Cost of Knowledge.
The Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union called out for action in April 2016 to migrate European Commission funded research to Open Science. European Commissioner Carlos Moedas introduced the Open Science Cloud at the Open Science Conference in Amsterdam on 4–5 April. During this meeting also The Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science
was presented, a living document outlining concrete actions for the
European Community to move to Open Science. The European Commission
continues to be committed to an Open Science policy including developing
a repository for research digital objects, European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and metrics for evaluating quality and impact.
Two UN frameworks set out some common global standards for
concepts either closerely related to or subsumed under Open Science: the
UNESCO Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers, approved by the General Conference at its 39th session in 2017, and the
UNESCO Strategy on Open Access to scientific information and research, approved by the General Conference at its 36th session in 2011. In November 2019, UNESCO
was tasked by its 193 Member States, during their 40th General
Conference, with leading a global dialogue on Open Science to identify
globally-agreed norms and create a compregensive framework. In a multistakeholder, consultative, inclusive and participatory process, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science was developed, which was adopted by Member States in 2021.
Open Science and Research Assessment
A central aspect of the Open Science movement is the reform of research assessment. Initiatives such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) (launched in 2022) and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) advocate moving away from traditional quantitative metrics like the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and the h-Index,
as these often exhibit biases and neglect qualitative aspects. Instead,
alternative metrics and indicators, such as altmetrics and Open Science
indicators, are to be given greater consideration. Open Science
indicators include metrics such as the number of open access publications, data management plans, preprints, FAIR-licensed data, and open peer review
reports. These approaches aim to promote the transparency and
reusability of scientific outcomes, thereby enabling a fairer and more
comprehensive evaluation of scientific achievements.While Open Science
aims to enhance transparency, accessibility, and collaboration, the
introduction of numerous new metrics to measure openness has led to
unintended consequences. These metrics often rely on quantitative
indicators, which conflict with the holistic and qualitative approaches
advocated by initiatives such as CoARA and DORA. The core issue is that
these metrics are designed not only to measure but also to influence
researchers' behavior. This can result in "metric-driven" practices that
undermine research quality. Additionally, Open Science metrics lack
standardization and clarity regarding what they truly aim to measure.
The risk is that while these metrics may incentivize openness, they
could simultaneously distort the overall fairness and effectiveness of
research assessment.
Arguments in favor of open science generally focus on the value of
increased transparency in research, and in the public ownership of
science, particularly that which is publicly funded. In January 2014 J.
Christopher Bare published a comprehensive "Guide to Open Science". Likewise, in 2017, a group of scholars known for advocating open
science published a "manifesto" for open science in the journal Nature.
Advantages
Open access enables rigorous peer review
An article published by a team of NASA astrobiologists in 2010 in Science reported a bacterium known as GFAJ-1 that could purportedly metabolize arsenic (unlike any previously known species of lifeform). This finding, along with NASA's claim that the paper "will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life", met with criticism within the scientific community.
Much of the scientific commentary and critique around this issue took
place in public forums, most notably on Twitter, where hundreds of
scientists and non-scientists created a hashtag community around the hashtag #arseniclife. University of British Columbia astrobiologist Rosie Redfield, one of
the most vocal critics of the NASA team's research, also submitted a
draft of a research report of a study that she and colleagues conducted
which contradicted the NASA team's findings; the draft report appeared
in arXiv, an open-research repository, and Redfield called in her lab's research
blog for peer review both of their research and of the NASA team's
original paper. Researcher Jeff Rouder defined Open Science as "endeavoring to preserve
the rights of others to reach independent conclusions about your data
and work". The paper was eventually retracted, 15 years later, on 24 August 2025.
Publicly funded science will be publicly available
Public funding of research has long been cited as one of the primary reasons for providing Open Access to research articles. Since there is significant value in other parts of the research such as
code, data, protocols, and research proposals a similar argument is
made that since these are publicly funded, they should be publicly
available under a Creative Commons Licence.
Open science will make science more reproducible and transparent
Increasingly the reproducibility of science is being questioned and for many papers or multiple fields of researchwas shown to be lacking. This problem has been described as a "reproducibility crisis". For example, psychologist Stuart Vyse
notes that "(r)ecent research aimed at previously published psychology
studies has demonstrated – shockingly – that a large number of classic
phenomena cannot be reproduced, and the popularity of p-hacking is thought to be one of the culprits." Open Science approaches are proposed as one way to help increase the reproducibility of work as well as to help mitigate against manipulation of data.
Open science has more impact
There are several components to impact in research, many of which are hotly debated. However, under traditional scientific metrics parts Open science such
as Open Access and Open Data have proved to outperform traditional
versions.
Open Science can provide learning opportunities
Open science needs to acknowledge and accommodate the heterogeneity
of science. It provides opportunities for different communities to learn
from other communities, as well as to inform learning and practice across fields. For example, preregistration in quantitative sciences can benefit qualitative researchers to reduce researcher degrees of freedom, whereas positionality statements have been used to contextual researcher and research environment in qualitative can be used in order to combat reproducibility crisis in quantitative research. In addition, journals should be open to publishing these behaviours, using a guide to ease journal editors into open science.
Open science will help answer uniquely complex questions
Recent arguments in favor of Open Science have maintained that Open
Science is a necessary tool to begin answering immensely complex
questions, such as the neural basis of consciousness, ecosystem services or pandemics such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The typical argument propagates the fact that these types of
investigations are too complex to be carried out by any one individual,
and therefore, they must rely on a network of open scientists to be
accomplished. By default, the nature of these investigations gives this
"open science" the characteristics of "big science". It is thought that open science could support innovation and societal benefits, supporting and reinforcing research activities by enabling digital resources that could, for example, use or provide structured open data.
Disadvantages
The open sharing of research data is not widely practiced.
Arguments against open science tend to focus on the advantages of data ownership and concerns about the misuse of data, but see. Other concerns around data misuse involve privacy and safety risks that
arise from ecological data on protected animal populations or sensitive
data on human specimens that could potentially be re-identified and
lead to hard and stigma for certain populations.
Potential misuse
Allowing open access can bring documented cases of misuse, and such
misuse can take various forms from accidental errors to intentional
forms of misuse like misrepresenting data in order to manipulate or
deceive.
In 2011, Dutch researchers announced their intention to publish a research paper in the journal Science describing the creation of a strain of H5N1 influenza which can be easily passed between ferrets, the mammals which most closely mimic the human response to the flu. The announcement triggered a controversy in both political and scientific circles about the ethical implications of publishing scientific data which could be used to create biological weapons. These events are examples of how science data could potentially be misused. It has been argued that constraining the dissemination of dual-use knowledge can in certain cases be justified because, for example, "scientists have a responsibility for potentially
harmful consequences of their research; the public need not always know
of all scientific discoveries [or all its details]; uncertainty about
the risks of harm may warrant precaution; and expected benefits do not
always outweigh potential harm".
Scientists have collaboratively agreed to limit their own fields of inquiry on occasions such as the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA in 1975, and a proposed 2015 worldwide moratorium on a human-genome-editing technique. Differential technological development
aims to decrease risks by influencing the sequence in which
technologies are developed. Traditional legislative and regulatory
approaches may prove insufficient because they typically respond too
slowly to emerging dual-use research concerns.
The public may misunderstand science data
Data literacy is often positioned as a barrier to successful re-use
of open data. Scholars highlight the potential for citizens to
misinterpret data because they lack the expertise to critically
evaluate, analyze, and interpret data correctly.
In 2009 NASA launched the Kepler
spacecraft and promised that they would release collected data in June
2010. Later they decided to postpone release so that their scientists
could look at it first. Their rationale was that non-scientists might
unintentionally misinterpret the data, and NASA scientists thought it
would be preferable for them to be familiar with the data in advance so
that they could report on it with their level of accuracy.
Low-quality science
Post-publication peer review, a staple of open science, has been
criticized as promoting the production of lower quality papers that are
extremely voluminous. Specifically, critics assert that as quality is not guaranteed by
preprint servers, the veracity of papers will be difficult to assess by
individual readers. This will lead to rippling effects of false science,
akin to the recent epidemic of false news, propagated with ease on
social media websites. Common solutions to this problem have been cited as adaptations of a
new format in which everything is allowed to be published but a
subsequent filter-curator model is imposed to ensure some basic quality
of standards are met by all publications.
WEIRD-focus
Open Science is primarily driven by Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) society making it challenging for people from the Global South to adopt these aspects of Open Science. As a result, it perpetuates inequalities found across cultures.
However, journal editors have taken note of guidelines for change (e.g.)
in order to make sure Open Science is more inclusive with a focus of
multi-site studies and value of diversity within Open Science
discussion.
Actions and initiatives
Open-science projects
Different projects conduct, advocate, develop tools for, or fund open science.
The Allen Institute for Brain Science conducts numerous open science projects while the Center for Open Science has projects to conduct, advocate, and create tools for open science. Other workgroups have been created in different fields, such as the
Decision Analysis in R for Technologies in Health (DARTH) workgroup], which is a multi-institutional, multi-university collaborative effort
by researchers who have a common goal to develop transparent and
open-source solutions to decision analysis in health.
Organizations have extremely diverse sizes and structures. The Open Knowledge Foundation
(OKF) is a global organization sharing large data catalogs, running
face to face conferences, and supporting open source software projects.
In contrast, Blue Obelisk is an informal group of chemists and associated cheminformatics projects. The tableau of organizations is dynamic with some organizations becoming defunct, e.g., Science Commons, and new organizations trying to grow, e.g., the Self-Journal of Science. Common organizing forces include the knowledge domain, type of service provided, and even geography, e.g., OCSDNet's concentration on the developing world.
The Allen Brain Atlas maps gene expression in human and mouse brains; the Encyclopedia of Life documents all the terrestrial species; the Galaxy Zoo classifies galaxies; the International HapMap Project maps the haplotypes of the human genome; the Monarch Initiative makes available integrated public model organism and clinical data; and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
which regularizes and publishes data sets from many sources. All these
projects accrete information provided by many different researchers with
different standards of curation and contribution.
Mathematician Timothy Gowers launched open science journal Discrete Analysis in 2016 to demonstrate that a high-quality mathematics journal could be produced outside the traditional academic publishing industry. The launch followed a boycott of scientific journals that he initiated. The journal is published by a nonprofit which is owned and published by a team of scholars.
Other projects are organized around completion of projects that require extensive collaboration. For example, OpenWorm seeks to make a cellular level simulation of a roundworm, a multidisciplinary project. The Polymath Project
seeks to solve difficult mathematical problems by enabling faster
communications within the discipline of mathematics. The Collaborative
Replications and Education project recruits undergraduate students as citizen scientists by offering funding. Each project defines its needs for contributors and collaboration.
Another practical example for open science project was the first
"open" doctoral thesis started in 2012. It was made publicly available
as a self-experiment right from the start to examine whether this
dissemination is even possible during the productive stage of scientific
studies.The goal of the dissertation project: Publish everything related to the
doctoral study and research process as soon as possible, as
comprehensive as possible and under an open license, online available at
all time for everyone. End of 2017, the experiment was successfully completed and published in early 2018 as an open access book.
An example promoting accessibility of open-source code for research papers is CatalyzeX, which finds and links both official implementations by authors and
source code independently replicated by other researchers. These code
implementaons are also surfaced on the preprint server arXiv and open peer-review platform OpenReview.
The ideas of open science have also been applied to recruitment
with jobRxiv, a free and international job board that aims to mitigate
imbalances in what different labs can afford to spend on hiring.
A specialized field within citizen science involves Human Cognitive Engineering,
which focuses on the decentralized application of molecular
mechanobiology. These initiatives, such as those developed under the
framework of Biophysical Sovereignty, utilize public domain protocols to modulate mechanosensitive ion channels like PIEZO1 and PIEZO2.
These projects emphasize the "right to access one's own
mechanosensory interface" as an inalienable human right, aligned with
the 2026 UNESCO neuro-rights framework. Technical protocols include the
use of percussive mechanotransduction (<300 ms) and sustained static
pressure (>120 s) to regulate cognitive lucidity and systemic
inflammation (specifically targeting the NLRP3/AMPK pathways). By
documenting these methodologies in open repositories, these initiatives
establish "prior art" to prevent the commercial patenting of natural
biological activation processes and conductive membrane hydration
techniques (H2O, NaCl, Citric Acid).
Other advocates concentrate on educating scientists about
appropriate open science software tools. Education is available as
training seminars, e.g., the Software Carpentry project; as domain specific training materials, e.g., the Data Carpentry
project; and as materials for teaching graduate classes, e.g., the Open
Science Training Initiative. Many organizations also provide education
in the general principles of open science.
Within scholarly societies there are also sections and interest groups that promote open science practices. The Ecological Society of America has an Open Science Section. Similarly, the Society for American Archaeology has an Open Science Interest Group.
F1000Research provides open publishing and open peer review for the life sciences.
The Open Library of Humanities is a non-profit open access publisher for the humanities and social sciences.
The Journals Library of the National Institute for Health and Care Research
(NIHR) publishes all relevant documents and data from the onset of
research projects, updating them alongside the progress of the study.
Journal support for open-science does not conflict with preprint servers:
figshare archives and shares images, readings, and other data; and Open Science Framework preprints, arXiv, and HAL Archives Ouvertes provide electronic preprints across many fields.
Software
A variety of computer resources support open science. These include software like the Open Science Framework from the Center for Open Science to manage project information, data archiving and team coordination; distributed computing services like Ibercivis to use unused CPU time for computationally intensive tasks; and services like Experiment.com to provide crowdsourced funding for research projects.
Blockchain
platforms for open science have been proposed. The first such platform
is the Open Science Organization, which aims to solve urgent problems
with fragmentation of the scientific ecosystem and difficulties of
producing validated, quality science. Among the initiatives of Open
Science Organization include the Interplanetary Idea System (IPIS),
Researcher Index (RR-index), Unique Researcher Identity (URI), and
Research Network. The Interplanetary Idea System is a blockchain based
system that tracks the evolution of scientific ideas over time. It
serves to quantify ideas based on uniqueness and importance, thus
allowing the scientific community to identify pain points with current
scientific topics and preventing unnecessary re-invention of previously
conducted science. The Researcher Index aims to establish a data-driven
statistical metric for quantifying researcher impact. The Unique
Researcher Identity is a blockchain technology based solution for
creating a single unifying identity for each researcher, which is
connected to the researcher's profile, research activities, and
publications. The Research Network is a social networking platform for
researchers. A scientific paper from November 2019 examined the
suitability of blockchain technology to support open science.
Preprint Servers come in many varieties, but the standard traits
across them are stable: they seek to create a quick, free mode of
communicating scientific knowledge to the public. Preprint servers act
as a venue to quickly disseminate research and vary on their policies
concerning when articles may be submitted relative to journal
acceptance. Also typical of preprint servers is their lack of a peer-review process
– typically, preprint servers have some type of quality check in place
to ensure a minimum standard of publication, but this mechanism is not
the same as a peer-review mechanism. Some preprint servers have
explicitly partnered with the broader open science movement. Preprint servers can offer service similar to those of journals, and Google Scholar indexes many preprint servers and collects information about citations to preprints. The case for preprint servers is often made based on the slow pace of conventional publication formats. The motivation to start SocArXiv, an open-access preprint server for
social science research, is the claim that valuable research being
published in traditional venues often takes several months to years to
get published, which slows down the process of science significantly.
Another argument made in favor of preprint servers like SocArXiv is the
quality and quickness of feedback offered to scientists on their
pre-published work. The founders of SocArXiv claim that their platform allows researchers
to gain easy feedback from their colleagues on the platform, thereby
allowing scientists to develop their work into the highest possible
quality before formal publication and circulation. SocArXiv's founders
highlight several advantages: rapid colleague feedback enabling quality
improvements before formal publication, flexibility to update work for
rapid dissemination, and fewer procedural barriers than traditional
journals impose for article updates.[citation needed]
Perhaps the strongest advantage of some preprint servers is their
seamless compatibility with Open Science software such as the Open
Science Framework. The founders of SocArXiv claim that their preprint
server connects all aspects of the research life cycle in OSF with the
article being published on the preprint server. According to the
founders, this allows for greater transparency and minimal work on the
authors' part.
One criticism of pre-print servers is their potential to foster a
culture of plagiarism. For example, the popular physics preprint server
ArXiv had to withdraw 22 papers when it came to light that they were
plagiarized. In June 2002, a high-energy physicist in Japan was
contacted by a man called Ramy Naboulsi, a non-institutionally
affiliated mathematical physicist. Naboulsi requested Watanabe to upload
his papers on ArXiv as he was not able to do so, because of his lack of
an institutional affiliation. Later, the papers were realized to have
been copied from the proceedings of a physics conference. Preprint servers are increasingly developing measures to circumvent
this plagiarism problem. In developing nations like India and China,
explicit measures are being taken to combat it. These measures usually involve creating some type of central repository
for all available pre-prints, allowing the use of traditional
plagiarism detecting algorithms to detect the fraud. Nonetheless, this is a pressing issue in the discussion of pre-print servers, and consequently for open science.
Citizen science is research conducted with the participation of the general public, amateur or nonprofessional researchers, or participants from the fields of science, social science, and many other disciplines.The exact definition of "citizen science" varies, with different
individuals and organizations having their own specific interpretations
of its scope. Citizen science is employed in a wide range of areas of study, including ecology, biology, conservation, health and medical research, astronomy, media and communications, and information science.
The applications and functions of citizen science in research projects are multifaceted. Citizen science can be used as a methodology in which public volunteers help in data collection and classification, thereby improving the scientific community's capacity. Citizen science can also involve more direct involvement from the
public, with communities initiating projects researching environment and
health hazards within their own communities. Participation in citizen science projects also educates the public
about the scientific process and increases awareness about different
topics. Some schools incorporate citizen science projects as part of their teaching curricula for this very purpose.
The first use of the term "citizen science" appeared in a January 1989 issue of the MIT Technology Review, which featured three community-based labs studying environmental issues. In the 21st century, the number of citizen science projects, publications, and funding opportunities has increased. Citizen science has been used more over time, a trend helped by technological advancements. Digital citizen science platforms, such as Zooniverse and iNaturalist, store large amounts of data for many projects and are a place where volunteers can learn how to contribute to projects. For some projects, participants are instructed to collect and enter
data, such as the species they observed, into large digital global
databases.For other projects, participants help classify data on digital platforms. Citizen science data is also being used to develop machine learning algorithms. An example is using volunteer-classified images to train machine learning algorithms to identify species. While global participation and global databases are found on online platforms, the uniformity of data from contributors across different locations is not guaranteed. Concerns over potential data quality issues in citizen science projects, including measurement errors and biases,
are recognized in the scientific community. However, statistical
solutions and best practices are available to assist in addressing these
concerns.
Definition
The term "citizen science" has multiple origins, as well as differing concepts. "Citizen" is used in the general sense, as meaning in "citizen of the
world", or the general public, rather than the legal term citizen of sovereign countries. It was first defined independently in the mid-1990s by Rick Bonney in the United States and Alan Irwin in the United Kingdom. Alan Irwin, a British sociologist, defines citizen science as
"developing concepts of scientific citizenship which foregrounds the
necessity of opening up science and science policy processes to the
public". Irwin sought to reclaim two dimensions of the relationship between
citizens and science: 1) that science should be responsive to citizens'
concerns and needs; and 2) that citizens themselves could produce
reliable scientific knowledge. The American ornithologist
Rick Bonney, unaware of Irwin's work, defined citizen science as
projects in which nonscientists, such as amateur birdwatchers,
voluntarily contributed scientific data. This describes a more limited
role for citizens in scientific research than Irwin's conception of the
term.
The terms citizen science and citizen scientists entered the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in June 2014. "Citizen science" is defined as "scientific work undertaken by members
of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the
direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions". "Citizen scientist" is defined as: (a) "a scientist whose work is
characterized by a sense of responsibility to serve the best interests
of the wider community (now rare)"; or (b) "a member of the general
public who engages in scientific work, often in collaboration with or
under the direction of professional scientists and scientific
institutions; an amateur scientist". The first use of the term "citizen scientist" can be found in the magazine New Scientist in an article about ufology from October 1979.
Muki Haklay cites, from a policy report for the Wilson Center
entitled "Citizen Science and Policy: A European Perspective", an
alternate first use of the term "citizen science" by R. Kerson in the
magazine MIT Technology Review from January 1989. Quoting from the Wilson Center report: "The new form of engagement in
science received the name 'citizen science'. The first recorded example
of the use of the term is from 1989, describing how 225 volunteers
across the US collected rain samples to assist the Audubon Society in an acid-rain awareness raising campaign."
Citizen science volunteers and coordinator near a pond observe a frog.
A Green Paper on Citizen Science was published in 2013 by the European Commission's
Digital Science Unit and Socientize.eu, which included a definition for
citizen science, referring to "the general public engagement in
scientific research activities when citizens actively contribute to
science either with their intellectual effort or surrounding knowledge
or with their tools and resources. Participants provide experimental
data and facilities for researchers, raise new questions and co-create a
new scientific culture."
Citizen science may be performed by individuals, teams, or
networks of volunteers. Citizen scientists often partner with
professional scientists to achieve common goals. Large volunteer
networks often allow scientists to accomplish tasks that would be too
expensive or time-consuming to accomplish through other means.
Many citizen-science projects serve education and outreach goals. These projects may be designed for a formal classroom environment or an informal education environment such as museums.
Citizen science has evolved over the past four decades. Recent
projects place more emphasis on scientifically sound practices and
measurable goals for public education. Modern citizen science differs from its historical forms primarily in
the access for, and subsequent scale of, public participation;
technology is credited as one of the main drivers of the recent
explosion of citizen science activity.
In March 2015, the Office of Science and Technology Policy published a factsheet entitled "Empowering Students and Others through Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing". Quoting: "Citizen science and crowdsourcing projects are powerful tools
for providing students with skills needed to excel in science,
technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Volunteers in citizen science,
for example, gain hands-on experience doing real science, and in many
cases take that learning outside of the traditional classroom setting". The National Academies of Science cites SciStarter
as a platform offering access to more than 2,700 citizen science
projects and events, as well as helping interested parties access tools
that facilitate project participation.
Members of the Cascades Butterfly Citizen Science Team pictured on Sauk mountain
In May 2016, a new open-access journal was started by the Citizen Science Association along with Ubiquity Press called Citizen Science: Theory and Practice (CS:T&P). Quoting from the editorial article titled "The Theory and Practice of Citizen Science: Launching a New Journal", "CS:T&P
provides the space to enhance the quality and impact of citizen science
efforts by deeply exploring the citizen science concept in all its
forms and across disciplines. By examining, critiquing, and sharing
findings across a variety of citizen science endeavors, we can dig into
the underpinnings and assumptions of citizen science and critically
analyze its practice and outcomes."
In February 2020, Timber Press, an imprint of Workman Publishing Company, published The Field Guide to Citizen Science as a practical guide for anyone interested in getting started with citizen science.
Alternative definitions
Other definitions for citizen science have also been proposed. For example, Bruce Lewenstein of Cornell University's Communication and S&TS departments describes three possible definitions:
The participation of nonscientists in the process of gathering
data according to specific scientific protocols and in the process of
using and interpreting that data.
The engagement of nonscientists in true decision-making about policy issues that have technical or scientific components.
The engagement of research scientists in the democratic and policy process.
A 2014 Mashable
article defines a citizen scientist as: "Anybody who voluntarily
contributes his or her time and resources toward scientific research in
partnership with professional scientists."
In 2016, the Australian Citizen Science Association
released their definition, which states "Citizen science involves
public participation and collaboration in scientific research with the
aim to increase scientific knowledge."
In 2020, a group of birders in the Pacific Northwest of North
America, eBird Northwest, has sought to rename "citizen science" to the
use of "community science", "largely to avoid using the word 'citizen'
when we want to be inclusive and welcoming to any birder or person who
wants to learn more about bird watching, regardless of their citizen
status."
Typologies of citizen science
Citizen science initiatives are commonly categorized according to the
level of involvement of the citizen scientists. Towards the lower end
of involvement, terms such as crowdsourcing or contributory citizen
science describe that citizen scientists contribute observations,
collect data or merely offer computing power or install sensors to
measure environmental variables. Towards the higher end of involvement, "extreme citizen science" and
co-creation are terms used to describe initiatives in which citizen
scientists are involved in decisions influencing the goal and research
methods or even lead research initiatives.
Tasks performed by citizen scientists
Typology after Haklay 2013
Typology after Senabre Hidalgo et al. 2022
Typology after Mahr and Dickel 2019
Typology after King et al. 2016
Defining research focus or leading research initiatives
Extreme citizen science
Co-creation and participatory approaches
Uninvited participation
By the people
Co-developing research questions and methods
Participatory science
Invited participation
With the people
Collecting data or classifying information
Distributed intelligence
Contributory citizen science
For the people
Providing resources or installing sensors
Crowdsourcing
Related fields
In a Smart City era, Citizen Science relies on various web-based tools, such as WebGIS, and becomes Cyber Citizen Science. Some projects, such as SETI@home, use the Internet to take advantage of distributed computing.
These projects are generally passive. Computation tasks are performed
by volunteers' computers and require little involvement beyond initial
setup. There is disagreement as to whether these projects should be
classified as citizen science.
The astrophysicist and Galaxy Zoo co-founder Kevin Schawinski
stated: "We prefer to call this [Galaxy Zoo] citizen science because
it's a better description of what you're doing; you're a regular citizen
but you're doing science. Crowd sourcing
sounds a bit like, well, you're just a member of the crowd and you're
not; you're our collaborator. You're pro-actively involved in the
process of science by participating."
Compared to SETI@home, "Galaxy Zoo volunteers do real work.
They're not just passively running something on their computer and
hoping that they'll be the first person to find aliens. They have a
stake in science that comes out of it, which means that they are now
interested in what we do with it, and what we find."
Citizen policy may be another result of citizen science
initiatives. Bethany Brookshire (pen name SciCurious) writes: "If
citizens are going to live with the benefits or potential consequences
of science (as the vast majority of them will), it's incredibly
important to make sure that they are not only well informed about
changes and advances in science and technology, but that they also ...
are able to ... influence the science policy decisions that could impact
their lives." In "The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science", editors Darlene Cavalier
and Eric Kennedy highlight emerging connections between citizen
science, civic science, and participatory technology assessment.
Benefits and limitations
The general public's involvement in scientific projects has become a
means of encouraging curiosity and greater understanding of science
while providing an unprecedented engagement between professional
scientists and the general public. In a research report published by the U.S. National Park Service
in 2008, Brett Amy Thelen and Rachel K. Thiet mention the following
concerns, previously reported in the literature, about the validity of
volunteer-generated data:
Some projects may not be suitable for volunteers, for instance,
when they use complex research methods or require a great deal of (often
repetitive) work.
If volunteers lack proper training in research and monitoring
protocols, the data they collect might introduce bias into the dataset.
The question of data accuracy, in particular, remains open. John Losey, who created the Lost Ladybug
citizen science project, has argued that the cost-effectiveness of
citizen science data can outweigh data quality issues, if properly
managed.
In December 2016, authors M. Kosmala, A. Wiggins, A. Swanson and B. Simmons published a study in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment called "Assessing Data Quality in Citizen Science". The abstract describes how ecological and environmental citizen science
projects have enormous potential to advance science. Citizen science
projects can influence policy and guide resource management by producing
datasets that are otherwise not feasible to generate. In the section "In a Nutshell" (pg3), four condensed conclusions are stated. They are:
Datasets produced by volunteer citizen scientists can have reliably high quality, on par with those produced by professionals.
Individual volunteer accuracy varies, depending on task difficulty
and volunteer experience. Multiple methods exist for boosting accuracy
to required levels for a given project.
Most types of bias
found in CS datasets are also found in professionally produced datasets
and can be accommodated using existing statistical tools.
Reviewers of CS projects should look for iterated project design,
standardization and appropriateness of volunteer protocols and data
analyses, capture of metadata, and accuracy assessment.
They conclude that as citizen science continues to grow and mature, a
key metric of project success they expect to see will be a growing
awareness of data quality. They also conclude that citizen science will
emerge as a general tool helping "to collect otherwise unobtainable
high-quality data in support of policy and resource management,
conservation monitoring, and basic science."
A study of Canadian lepidoptera
datasets published in 2018 compared the use of a professionally curated
dataset of butterfly specimen records with four years of data from a
citizen science program, eButterfly. The eButterfly dataset was used as it was determined to be of high
quality because of the expert vetting process used on site, and there
already existed a dataset covering the same geographic area consisting
of specimen data, much of it institutional. The authors note that, in
this case, citizen science data provides both novel and complementary
information to the specimen data. Five new species were reported from
the citizen science data, and geographic distribution information was
improved for over 80% of species in the combined dataset when citizen
science data was included.
Several recent studies have begun to explore the accuracy of
citizen science projects and how to predict accuracy based on variables
like expertise of practitioners. One example is a 2021 study by Edgar
Santos-Fernandez and Kerrie Mengersen of the British Ecological Society, who utilized a case study which used recent R and Stan programming software to offer ratings of the accuracy of species identifications performed by citizen scientists in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania.
This provided insight into possible problems with processes like this
which include, "discriminatory power and guessing behaviour". The
researchers determined that methods for rating the citizen scientists
themselves based on skill level and expertise might make studies they
conduct more easy to analyze.
Studies that are simple in execution are where citizen science
excels, particularly in the field of conservation biology and ecology.
For example, in 2019, Sumner et al. compared the data of vespid wasp distributions collected by citizen scientists with the 4-decade, long-term dataset established by the BWARS. They set up the Big Wasp Survey from 26 August to 10 September 2017,
inviting citizen scientists to trap wasps and send them for
identification by experts where data was recorded. The results of this
study showed that the campaign garnered over 2,000 citizen scientists
participating in data collection, identifying over 6,600 wasps. This
experiment provides strong evidence that citizen science can generate
potentially high-quality data comparable to that of expert data
collection, within a shorter time frame. Although the experiment was to
originally test the strength of citizen science, the team also learned
more about Vespidae biology and species distribution in the United Kingdom.
With this study, the simple procedure enabled citizen science to be
executed in a successful manner. A study by J. Cohn describes that
volunteers can be trained to use equipment and process data, especially
considering that a large proportion of citizen scientists are
individuals who are already well-versed in the field of science.
The demographics of participants in citizen science projects are
overwhelmingly White adults, of above-average income, having a
university degree. Other groups of volunteers include conservationists, outdoor
enthusiasts, and amateur scientists. As such, citizen scientists are
generally individuals with a pre-understanding of the scientific method and how to conduct sensible and just scientific analysis.
In September 2015, ECSA published its Ten Principles of Citizen Science, which have been developed by the "Sharing best practice and building capacity" working group of ECSA, led by the Natural History Museum, London with input from many members of the association.
Citizen science projects actively involve citizens in scientific
endeavour that generates new knowledge or understanding. Citizens may
act as contributors, collaborators, or as project leader and have a
meaningful role in the project.
Citizen science projects have a genuine science outcome. For
example, answering a research question or informing conservation action,
management decisions or environmental policy.
Both the professional scientists and the citizen scientists benefit
from taking part. Benefits may include the publication of research
outputs, learning opportunities, personal enjoyment, social benefits,
satisfaction through contributing to scientific evidence e.g. to address
local, national and international issues, and through that, the
potential to influence policy.
Citizen scientists may, if they wish, participate in multiple stages
of the scientific process. This may include developing the research
question, designing the method, gathering and analysing data, and
communicating the results.
Citizen scientists receive feedback from the project. For example,
how their data are being used and what the research, policy or societal
outcomes are.
Citizen science is considered a research approach like any other,
with limitations and biases that should be considered and controlled
for. However unlike traditional research approaches, citizen science
provides opportunity for greater public engagement and democratisation
of science.
Citizen science project data and meta-data are made publicly
available and where possible, results are published in an open access
format. Data sharing may occur during or after the project, unless there are security or privacy concerns that prevent this.
Citizen scientists are acknowledged in project results and publications.
Citizen science programmes are evaluated for their scientific
output, data quality, participant experience and wider societal or
policy impact.
The leaders of citizen science projects take into consideration
legal and ethical issues surrounding copyright, intellectual property,
data sharing agreements, confidentiality, attribution, and the
environmental impact of any activities.
The medical ethics of internet crowdsourcing has been questioned by Graber & Graber in the Journal of Medical Ethics. In particular, they analyse the effect of games and the crowdsourcing project Foldit. They conclude: "games can have possible adverse effects, and that they manipulate the user into participation".
In March 2019, the online journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice launched a collection of articles on the theme of Ethical Issues in Citizen Science. The articles are introduced with (quoting): "Citizen science can
challenge existing ethical norms because it falls outside of customary
methods of ensuring that research is conducted ethically. What ethical
issues arise when engaging the public in research? How have these issues
been addressed, and how should they be addressed in the future?"
In June 2019, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
(EASTS) published an issue titled "Citizen Science: Practices and
Problems" which contains 15 articles/studies on citizen science,
including many relevant subjects of which ethics is one. Quoting from the introduction "Citizen, Science, and Citizen Science":
"The term citizen science has become very popular among scholars as well
as the general public, and, given its growing presence in East Asia, it
is perhaps not a moment too soon to have a special issue of EASTS on
the topic."
Use of citizen science volunteers as de facto unpaid laborers by some commercial ventures have been criticized as exploitative.
Ethics in citizen science in the health and welfare field, has
been discussed in terms of protection versus participation. Public
involvement researcher Kristin Liabo writes that health researcher
might, in light of their ethics training, be inclined to exclude
vulnerable individuals from participation, to protect them from harm.
However, she argues these groups are already likely to be excluded from
participation in other arenas, and that participation can be empowering
and a possibility to gain life skills that these individuals need.
Whether or not to become involved should be a decision these individuals
should be involved in and not a researcher decision.
Data governance, privacy and sovereignty
As citizen science becomes increasingly influenced by digital
platforms and sensors, governance questions go beyond research ethics to
include data protection law and community control over reuse. Under the
General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR), participatory projects that involve personal data can
complicate the usual separation between professional researchers
("controllers") and participants ("data subjects"): citizen scientists
may be considered joint controllers when they share or shape project
purposes, which could expose volunteers to compliance responsibilities
and create risks for both participant protections and project
legitimacy. Practical guidance for citizen science therefore increasingly requires
early planning for lawful data handling, clear allocation of
responsibilities, and transparency about data flows across collection,
storage, and sharing.
A second governance challenge concerns power asymmetries in open
data. Because volunteers often produce data while institutions handle
and publish it, decisions about openness, attribution, and access
restrictions can include unequal priorities and certain vulnerabilities.
Ethical open-data practice in citizen science is therefore frequently
framed as a matter of data governance, not only technical quality. These
concerns also extend to environmental monitoring where data may be
politically sensitive (e.g., pollution exposure, land use, biodiversity
decline).
Finally, monitoring initiatives have highlighted data sovereignty: the principle that indigenous peoples
and local communities should govern collection, ownership, access and
use of data connected to territories and cultural knowledge; so that
digital monitoring does not reproduce colonialist tendencies between
knowledge holders and external institutions. Related international policy discussions on open science explicitly
point out that openness should not overrule privacy, equity, or
indigenous rights over traditional knowledge.
Economic worth
In the research paper "Can citizen science enhance public understanding of science?" by Bonney et al. 2016, statistics which analyse the economic worth of citizen science are used, drawn from two papers: i) Sauermann and Franzoni 2015, and
ii) Theobald et al. 2015. In "Crowd science user contribution patterns and their implications" by
Sauermann and Franzoni (2015), seven projects from the Zooniverse web
portal are used to estimate the monetary value of the citizen science
that had taken place. The seven projects are: Solar Stormwatch, Galaxy
Zoo Supernovae, Galaxy Zoo Hubble, Moon Zoo, Old Weather, The Milky Way
Project and Planet Hunters. Using data from 180 days in 2010, they find a total of 100,386 users participated, contributing 129,540 hours of unpaid work. Estimating at a rate of $12 an hour (an undergraduate research
assistant's basic wage), the total contributions amount to $1,554,474,
an average of $222,068 per project. The range over the seven projects was from $22,717 to $654,130.
In "Global change and local solutions: Tapping the unrealized
potential of citizen science for biodiversity research" by Theobald et
al. 2015, the authors surveyed 388 unique biodiversity-based projects. Quoting: "We estimate that between 1.36 million and 2.28 million people
volunteer annually in the 388 projects we surveyed, though variation is
great" and that "the range of in-kind contribution of the volunteerism
in our 388 citizen science projects as between $667 million to $2.5
billion annually."
Worldwide participation in citizen science continues to grow. A list of the top five citizen science communities compiled by Marc Kuchner
and Kristen Erickson in July 2018 shows a total of 3.75 million
participants, although there is likely substantial overlap between the
communities.
Relations with education and academia
There have been studies published which examine the place of citizen science within education. Teaching aids can include books and activity or lesson plans.(e.g.). Some examples of studies are:
From the Second International Handbook of Science Education,
a chapter entitled: "Citizen Science, Ecojustice, and Science
Education: Rethinking an Education from Nowhere", by Mueller and Tippins
(2011), acknowledges in the abstract that: "There is an emerging
emphasis in science education on engaging youth in citizen science." The
authors also ask: "whether citizen science goes further with respect to
citizen development." The abstract ends by stating that the "chapter takes account of the
ways educators will collaborate with members of the community to
effectively guide decisions, which offers promise for sharing a
responsibility for democratizing science with others."
From the journal Democracy and Education, an article
entitled: "Lessons Learned from Citizen Science in the Classroom" by
authors Gray, Nicosia and Jordan (GNJ; 2012) gives a response to a study
by Mueller, Tippins and Bryan (MTB) called "The Future of Citizen
Science".GNJ begins by stating in the abstract that "The Future of Citizen
Science": "provides an important theoretical perspective about the
future of democratized science and K12
education." But GRB state: "However, the authors (MTB) fail to
adequately address the existing barriers and constraints to moving
community-based science into the classroom." They end the abstract by
arguing: "that the resource constraints of scientists, teachers, and
students likely pose problems to moving true democratized science into
the classroom."
In 2014, a study was published called "Citizen Science and Lifelong Learning" by R. Edwards in the journal Studies in the Education of Adults. Edwards begins by writing in the abstract that citizen science projects
have expanded over recent years and engaged citizen scientists and
professionals in diverse ways. He continues: "Yet there has been little
educational exploration of such projects to date." He describes that "there has been limited exploration of the
educational backgrounds of adult contributors to citizen science".
Edwards explains that citizen science contributors are referred to as
volunteers, citizens or as amateurs. He ends the abstract: "The article
will explore the nature and significance of these different
characterisations and also suggest possibilities for further research."
In the journal Microbiology and Biology Education a study was published by Shah and Martinez (2015) called "Current Approaches in Implementing Citizen Science in the Classroom". They begin by writing in the abstract that citizen science is a
partnership between inexperienced amateurs and trained scientists. The
authors continue: "With recent studies showing a weakening in scientific
competency of American students, incorporating citizen science
initiatives in the curriculum provides a means to address deficiencies". They argue that combining traditional and innovative methods can help
provide a practical experience of science. The abstract ends: "Citizen
science can be used to emphasize the recognition and use of systematic
approaches to solve problems affecting the community."
In November 2017, authors Mitchell, Triska and Liberatore published a study in PLOS One titled "Benefits and Challenges of Incorporating Citizen Science into University Education". The authors begin by stating in the abstract that citizen scientists
contribute data with the expectation that it will be used. It reports
that citizen science has been used for first year university students as
a means to experience research. They continue: "Surveys of more than
1500 students showed that their environmental engagement increased
significantly after participating in data collection and data analysis." However, only a third of students agreed that data collected by citizen
scientists was reliable. A positive outcome of this was that the
students were more careful of their own research. The abstract ends: "If
true for citizen scientists in general, enabling participants as well
as scientists to analyse data could enhance data quality, and so address
a key constraint of broad-scale citizen science programs."
Citizen science has also been described as challenging the "traditional hierarchies and structures of knowledge creation".
History
While citizen science developed at the end of the 20th century, characteristics of citizen science are not new. Prior to the 20th century, science was often the pursuit of gentleman scientists, amateur or self-funded researchers such as Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Darwin. Women citizen scientists from before the 20th century include Florence Nightingale who "perhaps better embodies the radical spirit of citizen science". Before the professionalization of science by the end of the 19th
century, most pursued scientific projects as an activity rather than a
profession itself, an example being amateur naturalists in the 18th and 19th centuries.
During the British colonization of North America, American
Colonists recorded the weather, offering much of the information now
used to estimate climate data and climate change during this time
period. These people included John Campanius Holm, who recorded storms in the mid-1600s, as well as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin
who tracked weather patterns during America's founding. Their work
focused on identifying patterns by amassing their data and that of their
peers and predecessors, rather than specific professional knowledge in
scientific fields. Some consider these individuals as the progenitors of the citizen
scientist concept, while others ascribe this designation to prominent
figures such as Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Darwin.
However, there are also those who perceive citizen science as a
distinct movement that developed later on, building on the preceding
history of science.
However, by the mid-20th century, the scientific community was
dominated by researchers employed by universities and government
research laboratories. By the 1970s, this transformation was being
called into question. Philosopher Paul Feyerabend called for a "democratization of science". Biochemist Erwin Chargaff advocated a return to science by nature-loving amateurs in the tradition of Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Buffon, and Darwin. This approach would prioritize the contributions of "amateurship instead of money-biased technical bureaucrats".
A 2016 study indicates that the largest impact of citizen science
is evident in research domains such as biology, conservation, and
ecology. The primary utilization of citizen science is as a methodology
for data collection and classification.
Amateur astronomers can build their own equipment and can hold star parties and gatherings, such as Stellafane.
Astronomy has long been a field where amateurs have contributed throughout time, all the way up to the present day.
Collectively, amateur astronomers observe a variety of celestial objects and phenomena sometimes with equipment that they build themselves. Common targets of amateur astronomers include the Moon, planets, stars, comets, meteor showers, and a variety of deep-sky objects such as star clusters, galaxies, and nebulae. Observations of comets and stars are also used to measure the local level of artificial skyglow. One branch of amateur astronomy, amateur astrophotography,
involves the taking of photos of the night sky. Many amateurs like to
specialize in the observation of particular objects, types of objects,
or types of events that interest them.
The American Association of Variable Star Observers
has gathered data on variable stars for educational and professional
analysis since 1911 and promotes participation beyond its membership on
its Citizen Sky website.
Project PoSSUM is a relatively new organization, started in March
2012, which trains citizen scientists of many ages to go on polar
suborbital missions. On these missions, they study noctilucent clouds with remote sensing,
which reveals interesting clues about changes in the upper atmosphere
and the ozone due to climate change. This is a form of citizen science
which trains younger generations to be ambitious, participating in
intriguing astronomy and climate change science projects even without a
professional degree.
Butterfly counts have a long tradition of involving individuals in
the study of butterflies' range and their relative abundance. Two
long-running programs are the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (started in
1976) and the North American Butterfly Association's Butterfly Count Program (started in 1975). There are various protocols for monitoring butterflies and different
organizations support one or more of transects, counts and/or
opportunistic sightings. eButterfly
is an example of a program designed to capture any of the three types
of counts for observers in North America. Species-specific programs also
exist, with monarchs the prominent example. Two examples of this involve the counting of monarch butterflies during the fall migration
to overwintering sites in Mexico: (1) Monarch Watch is a continent-wide
project, while (2) the Cape May Monarch Monitoring Project is an
example of a local project.
Citizen science projects have become increasingly focused on providing benefits to scientific research. The North American Bird Phenology Program
(historically called the Bird Migration and Distribution records) may
have been the earliest collective effort of citizens collecting
ornithological information in the U.S. The program, dating back to 1883, was started by Wells Woodbridge
Cooke. Cooke established a network of observers around North America to
collect bird migration records. The Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count,
which began in 1900, is another example of a long-standing tradition of
citizen science which has persisted to the present day, now containing a collection of six million handwritten migration
observer cards that date back to the 19th century. Participants input
this data into an online database for analysis. Citizen scientists help
gather data that will be analyzed by professional researchers, and can
be used to produce bird population and biodiversity indicators.
Raptor migration research relies on the data collected by the hawkwatching
community. This mostly volunteer group counts migrating accipiters,
buteos, falcons, harriers, kites, eagles, osprey, vultures and other
raptors at hawk sites throughout North America during the spring and
fall seasons. The daily data is uploaded to hawkcount.org where it can be viewed by professional scientists and the public.
Other programs in North America include Project FeederWatch, which is affiliated with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Such indices can be useful tools to inform management, resource allocation, policy and planning. For example, European breeding bird survey data provide input for the Farmland Bird Index, adopted by the European Union as a structural indicator of sustainable development. This provides a cost-effective alternative to government monitoring.
Similarly, data collected by citizen scientists as part of
BirdLife Australia's has been analysed to produce the first-ever
Australian Terrestrial Bird Indices.
In the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
collaborated with a children's TV show to create a national birdwatching
day in 1979; the campaign has continued for over 40 years and in 2024,
over 600,000 people counted almost 10 million birds during the Big
Garden Birdwatch weekend.
Most recently, more programs have sprung up worldwide, including
NestWatch, a bird species monitoring program which tracks data on
reproduction. This might include studies on when and how often nesting
occurs, counting eggs laid and how many hatch successfully, and what
proportion of hatchlings survive infancy. Participation in this program
is extremely easy for the general public to join. Using the recently
created nest watch app which is available on almost all devices, anyone
can begin to observe their local species, recording results every 3 to 4
days within the app. This forms a continually-growing database which
researchers can view and utilize to understand trends within specific
bird populations.
Citizen oceanography
The concept of citizen science has been extended to the ocean environment for characterizing ocean dynamics and tracking marine debris. For example, the mobile app Marine Debris Tracker is a joint partnership of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Georgia. Long term sampling efforts such as the continuous plankton recorder
has been fitted on ships of opportunity since 1931. Plankton collection
by sailors and subsequent genetic analysis was pioneered in 2013 by
Indigo V Expeditions as a way to better understand marine microbial
structure and function.
Coral reefs
Citizen science in coral reef studies developed in the 21st century.
Underwater photography
has become more popular since the development of moderate priced
digital cameras with waterproof housings in the early 2000s, resulting
on millions of pictures posted every year on various websites and social
media. This mass of documentation has great scientific potential, as
millions of tourists possess a much superior coverage power than
professional scientists, who cannot spend so much time in the field.
As a consequence, several participative sciences programs have been developed, supported by geotagging and identification web sites such as iNaturalist. The Monitoring through many eyes project collates thousands of underwater images of the Great Barrier Reef and provides an interface for elicitation of reef health indicators.
There also exist protocols for auto-organization and
self-teaching aimed at biodiversity-interested snorkelers, in order for
them to turn their observations into sound scientific data, available
for research. This kind of approach has been successfully used in Réunion island, allowing for tens of new records and even new species.
Freshwater fish
Aquarium hobbyists and their respective organizations are very
passionate about fish conservation and often more knowledgeable about
specific fish species and groups than scientific researchers. They have played an important role in the conservation of freshwater
fishes by discovering new species, maintaining extensive databases with
ecological information on thousands of species (such as for catfish, Mexican freshwater fishes, killifishes, cichlids), and successfully keeping and providing endangered and extinct-in-the-wild species for conservation projects. The CARES (Conservation, Awareness, Recognition, Encouragement, and Support) preservation program is the largest hobbyist organization containing over 30 aquarium
societies and international organizations, and encourages serious
aquarium hobbyists to devote tank space to the most threatened or
extinct-in-the-wild species to ensure their survival for future
generations.
Amphibians
Citizen scientists also work to monitor and conserve amphibian populations. One recent project is FrogWatch USA, organized by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
Participants are invited to educate themselves on their local wetlands
and help to save amphibian populations by reporting the data on the
calls of local frogs and toads. The project already has over 150,000
observations from more than 5000 contributors. Participants are trained
by program coordinators to identify calls and utilize this training to
report data they find between February and August of each "monitoring
season". Data is used to monitor diversity, invasion, and long-term
shifts in population health within these frog and toad communities.
Rocky reefs
Reef Life Survey is a marine life monitoring programme based in Hobart, Tasmania. The project uses recreational divers that have been trained to make
fish and invertebrate counts, using an approximate 50 m constant depth
transect of tropical and temperate reefs, which might include coral
reefs. Reef Life Survey is international in its scope, but the data collectors are predominantly from Australia. The database is available to marine ecology researchers, and is used by several marine protected area managements in Australia, New Zealand, American Samoa and the eastern Pacific. Its results have also been included in the Australian Ocean DATA Network.
Agriculture
Farmer participation in experiments has a long tradition in agricultural science. There are many opportunities for citizen engagement in different parts of food systems. Citizen science is actively used for crop variety selection for climate adaptation, involving thousands of farmers. Citizen science has also played a role in furthering sustainable agriculture.
Art history
Citizen science has a long tradition in natural science. Today, citizen science projects can also be found in various fields of science like art history. For example, the Zooniverse
project AnnoTate is a transcription tool developed to enable volunteers
to read and transcribe the personal papers of British-born and émigré
artists. The papers are drawn from the Tate Archive. Another example of citizen science in art history is ARTigo. ARTigo collects semantic
data on artworks from the footprints left by players of games featuring
artwork images. From these footprints, ARTigo automatically builds a semantic search engine for artworks.
Biodiversity
Distribution
of citizen science data published to the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility (GBIF) by taxa for countries in Northern Europe
Citizen science has made significant contributions to the analysis of biodiversity across the world. A majority of data collected has been focused primarily on species occurrence, abundance and phenology, with birds being primarily the most popular group observed. There is growing efforts to expand the use of citizen science across
other fields. Past data on biodiversity has had limitations in the
quantity of data to make any meaningful broad connections to losses in
biodiversity. Recruiting citizens already out in the field opens a
tremendous amount of new data. For example, thousands of farmers
reporting the changes in biodiversity in their farms over many years has
provided a large amount of relevant data concerning the effect of
different farming methods on biodiversity. Another example is WomSAT, a citizen science project that collects data on wombatroadkill and sarcoptic mange incidence and distribution, to support conservation efforts for the species.
Citizen science can be used to great effect in addition to the usual
scientific methods in biodiversity monitoring. The typical active method
of species detection is able to collect data on the broad biodiversity
of areas while citizen science approaches has shown to be more effective
at identifying invasive species. In combination, this provides an effective strategy of monitoring the changes in biodiversity of ecosystems.
In the research fields of health and welfare, citizen science is
often discussed in other terms, such as "public involvement", "user
engagement", or "community member involvement". However the meaning is
similar to citizen science, with the exception that citizens are not
often involved in collecting data but more often involved in
prioritisation of research ideas and improving methodology, e.g. survey
questions. In the last decades, researchers and funders have gained
awareness of the benefits from involving citizens in the research work,
but the involvement of citizens in a meaningful way is not a common
practice. There is an ongoing discussion on how to evaluate citizen science in health and welfare research.
One aspect to consider in citizen science in health and welfare, that stands out compared to in other academic fields, is who
to involve. When research concerns human experiences, representation of
a group becomes important. While it is commonly acknowledged that the
people involved need to have lived experience of the concerned topic, representation is still an issue, and researchers are debating whether this is a useful concept in citizen science.
Outside of the older patient and public involvement tradition,
there are also efforts to bring the newer citizen science efforts to
health and biomedical research. These efforts cover a broad spectrum of
involvement and co-leadership of patients, including patient-led
research, quantified self or personal science, as well as collaborative research efforts between researchers and patient-groups, often enabled by digital technology. A survey among European practitioners involved in health-related
citizen science found that ethical challenges and achieving a balanced
return on investment for patients and medical staff are common
challenges.
Modern technology
Newer technologies have increased the options for citizen science. Citizen scientists can build and operate their own instruments to
gather data for their own experiments or as part of a larger project.
Examples include amateur radio, amateur astronomy, Six Sigma Projects, and Maker activities. Scientist Joshua Pearce has advocated for the creation of open-source hardware based scientific equipment that both citizen scientists and professional scientists, which can be replicated by digital manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing. Multiple studies have shown this approach radically reduces scientific equipment costs. Examples of this approach include water testing, nitrate and other environmental testing, basic biology and optics. Groups such as Public Lab, which is a community where citizen scientists can learn how to investigate environmental concerns using inexpensive DIY techniques, embody this approach.
Video technology is much used in scientific research. The Citizen Science Center in the Nature Research Center wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences
has exhibits on how to get involved in scientific research and become a
citizen scientist. For example, visitors can observe birdfeeders at the
Prairie Ridge Ecostation satellite facility via live video feed and record which species they see.
Since 2005, the Genographic Project
has used the latest genetic technology to expand our knowledge of the
human story, and its pioneering use of DNA testing to engage and involve
the public in the research effort has helped to create a new breed of
"citizen scientist". Geno 2.0 expands the scope for citizen science,
harnessing the power of the crowd to discover new details of human population history. This includes supporting, organization and dissemination of personal DNA testing. Like amateur astronomy, citizen scientists encouraged by volunteer organizations like the International Society of Genetic Genealogy have provided valuable information and research to the professional scientific community.
Citizens in Space (CIS), a project of the United States Rocket
Academy, seeks to combine citizen science with citizen space
exploration. CIS is training citizen astronauts to fly as payload operators on
suborbital reusable spacecraft that are now in development. CIS will
also be developing, and encouraging others to develop, citizen-science
payloads to fly on suborbital vehicles. CIS has already acquired a
contract for 10 flights on the Lynx suborbital vehicle, being developed
by XCOR Aerospace, and plans to acquire additional flights on XCOR Lynx and other suborbital vehicles in the future.
CIS believes that "The development of low-cost reusable
suborbital spacecraft will be the next great enabler, allowing citizens
to participate in space exploration and space science."
The website CitizenScience.gov was started by the U.S.
government to "accelerate the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science"
in the United States. Following the internet's rapid increase of citizen
science projects, this site is one of the most prominent resource banks
for citizen scientists and government supporters alike. It features
three sections: a catalog of existing citizen science projects which are
federally supported, a toolkit to help federal officials as they
develop and maintain their future projects, and several other resources
and projects. This was created as the result of a mandate within the
Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2016 (15 USC 3724).
Internet
The Internet has been a boon to citizen science, particularly through gamification. One of the first Internet-based citizen science experiments was NASA's Clickworkers,
which enabled the general public to assist in the classification of
images, greatly reducing the time to analyze large data sets. Another
was the Citizen Science Toolbox, launched in 2003, of the Australian
Coastal Collaborative Research Centre. Mozak is a game in which players create 3D reconstructions from images
of actual human and mouse neurons, helping to advance understanding of
the brain. One of the largest citizen science games is Eyewire, a brain-mapping puzzle game developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that now has over 200,000 players. Another example is Quantum Moves, a game developed by the Center for Driven Community Research at Aarhus University, which uses online community efforts to solve quantum physics problems. The solutions found by players can then be used in the lab to feed computational algorithms used in building a scalable quantum computer.
More generally, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is frequently used in the creation, collection, and processing of data by paid citizens. There is controversy as to whether or not the data collected through
such services is reliable, as it is subject to participants' desire for
compensation. However, use of Mechanical Turk tends to quickly produce more diverse
participant backgrounds, as well as comparably accurate data when
compared to traditional collection methods.
The internet has also enabled citizen scientists to gather data
to be analyzed by professional researchers. Citizen science networks are
often involved in the observation of cyclic events of nature (phenology), such as effects of global warming on plant and animal life in different geographic areas, and in monitoring programs for natural-resource management. On BugGuide.Net, an online community of naturalists who share observations of arthropod,
amateurs and professional researchers contribute to the analysis. By
October 2022, BugGuide has over 1,886,513 images submitted by 47,732
contributors.
A NASA/JPL image from the Zooniverse's The Milky Way Project showing a hierarchical bubble structure
Not counting iNaturalist and eBird, the Zooniverse is home to the internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced,
maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA). The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other
partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and
ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the
flood of data that confronts them. On 29 June 2015, the Zooniverse
released a new software version with a project-building tool allowing
any registered user to create a project. Project owners may optionally complete an approval process to have
their projects listed on the Zooniverse site and promoted to the
Zooniverse community. A NASA/JPL picture to the right gives an example from one of Zooniverse's projects The Milky Way Project.
The website CosmoQuest
has as its goal "To create a community of people bent on together
advancing our understanding of the universe; a community of people who
are participating in doing science, who can explain why what they do
matters, and what questions they are helping to answer."
CrowdCrafting enables its participants to create and run projects
where volunteers help with image classification, transcription,
geocoding and more. The platform is powered by PyBossa software, a free and open-source framework for crowdsourcing.
Project Soothe is a citizen science research project based at the
University of Edinburgh. The aim of this research is to create a bank
of soothing images, submitted by members of the public, which can be
used to help others through psychotherapy and research in the future.
Since 2015, Project Soothe has received over 600 soothing photographs
from people in 23 countries. Anyone aged 12 years or over is eligible to
participate in this research in two ways: (1) By submitting soothing
photos that they have taken with a description of why the images make
them feel soothed (2) By rating the photos that have been submitted by
people worldwide for their soothability.
Sequential aspects of a Citizens' Observatory programme
The internet has allowed for many individuals to share and upload
massive amounts of data. Using the internet citizen observatories have
been designed as a platform to both increase citizen participation and
knowledge of their surrounding environment by collecting whatever
relevant data is focused by the program. The idea is making it easier and more exciting for citizens to get and stay involved in local data collection.
The invention of social media
has aided in providing massive amounts of information from the public
to create citizen science programs. In a case study by Andrea
Liberatore, Erin Bowkett, Catriona J. MacLeod, Eric Spurr, and Nancy Longnecker,
the New Zealand Garden Bird Survey is conducted as one such project
with the aid of social media. It examines the influence of utilizing a
Facebook group to collect data from citizen scientists as the
researchers work on the project over the span of a year. The authors
claim that this use of social media greatly helps with the efficiency of
this study and makes the atmosphere feel more communal.
Smartphone
The bandwidth and ubiquity afforded by smartphones has vastly expanded the opportunities for citizen science. Examples include iNaturalist, Chronolog, the San Francisco project, Mosquito Alert, the WildLab, Project Noah, and Aurorasurus. Due to their ubiquity, for example, Twitter, Facebook, and smartphones have been useful for citizen scientists, having enabled them to discover and propagate a new type of aurora dubbed STEVE in 2016.
There are also apps for monitoring birds, marine wildlife and other organisms, and the "Loss of the Night". Chronolog, another citizen science initiative, uses smartphone
photography to crowdsource environmental monitoring through timelapses. By positioning their cameras at designated photo stations and
submitting images, participants contribute to long-term ecological
records at parks and conservation sites across 48 U.S. states and 10
countries. Restoration professionals and other land stewards use this data to
measure ecosystem health and understand the effectiveness of
conservation interventions like habitat restoration, controlled burns, removal of invasive species, planting of native species, and efforts to improve water quality.
"The Crowd and the Cloud" is a four-part series broadcast during April 2017, which examines citizen science. It shows how smartphones, computers and mobile technology enable
regular citizens to become part of a 21st-century way of doing science. The programs also demonstrate how citizen scientists help professional
scientists to advance knowledge, which helps speed up new discoveries
and innovations. The Crowd & The Cloud is based upon work supported
by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Seismology
Since 1975, in order to improve earthquake detection and collect useful information, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre monitors the visits of earthquake eyewitnesses to its website and relies on Facebook and Twitter. More recently, they developed the LastQuake mobile application which notifies users about earthquakes occurring
around the world, alerts people when earthquakes hit near them, gathers citizen seismologists' testimonies to estimate the felt ground shaking and possible damages.
Hydrology
Citizen science has been used to provide valuable data in hydrology (catchment science), notably flood risk, water quality, and water resource management. A growth in internet use and smartphone ownership has allowed users to
collect and share real-time flood-risk information using, for example,
social media and web-based forms. Although traditional data collection
methods are well-established, citizen science is being used to fill the
data gaps on a local level, and is therefore meaningful to individual
communities. Data collected from citizen science can also compare well
to professionally collected data. It has been demonstrated that citizen science is particularly advantageous during a flash flood because the public are more likely to witness these rarer hydrological events than scientists.
Citizen science includes projects that help monitor plastics and their associated pollution. These include The Ocean Cleanup, #OneLess, The Big Microplastic Survey, EXXpedition and Alliance to End Plastic Waste. Ellipsis seeks to map the distribution of litter using aerial data mapping by unmanned aerial vehicles and machine learning software. A Zooniverse project called The Plastic Tide (now finished) helped train an algorithm used by Ellipsis.
Examples of relevant articles (by date):
Citizen Science Promotes Environmental Engagement: (quote)
"Citizen science projects are rapidly gaining popularity among the
public, in which volunteers help gather data on species
that can be used by scientists in research. And it's not just adults
who are involved in these projects – even kids have collected
high-quality data in the US."
Tackling Microplastics on Our Own: (quote) "Plastics, ranging from the circles of soda can rings to microbeads
the size of pinheads, are starting to replace images of sewage for a
leading cause of pollution – especially in the ocean". Further, "With
recent backing from the Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act, citizen
science is increasingly embraced as a tool by US Federal agencies."
Citizen Scientists Are Tracking Plastic Pollution Worldwide: (quote)
"Scientists who are monitoring the spread of tiny pieces of plastic
throughout the environment are getting help from a small army of citizen
volunteers – and they're finding bits of polymer in some of the most remote parts of North America."
Artificial intelligence
and citizen scientists: Powering the clean-up of Asia Pacific's
beaches:(quote) "The main objective is to support citizen scientists
cleaning up New Zealand beaches and get a better understanding of why litter is turning up, so preventive and proactive action can be taken."
Citizen science could help address Canada's
plastic pollution problem: (quote) "But citizen engagement and
participation in science goes beyond beach cleanups, and can be used as a
tool to bridge gaps between communities and scientists. These
partnerships between scientists and citizen scientists have produced
real world data that have influenced policy changes."
Examples of relevant scientific studies or books include (by date):
Distribution and abundance of small plastic debris on beaches in the SE Pacific (Chile): a study supported by a citizen science project:
(quote) "The citizen science project 'National Sampling of Small
Plastic Debris' was supported by schoolchildren from all over Chile who
documented the distribution and abundance of small plastic debris on
Chilean beaches. Thirty-nine schools and nearly 1,000 students from
continental Chile and Easter Island participated in the activity."
Incorporating citizen science to study plastics in the environment:
(quote) "Taking advantage of public interest in the impact of plastic
on the marine environment, successful Citizen Science (CS) programs
incorporate members of the public to provide repeated sampling for time
series as well as synoptic collections over wide geographic regions."
Marine anthropogenic litter on British beaches: A 10-year nationwide assessment using citizen science data:
(quote) "Citizen science projects, whereby members of the public gather
information, offer a low-cost method of collecting large volumes of
data with considerable temporal and spatial coverage. Furthermore, such
projects raise awareness of environmental issues and can lead to
positive changes in behaviours and attitudes."
Determining Global Distribution of Microplastics by Combining Citizen Science and In-Depth Case Studies:
(quote) "Our first project involves the general public through citizen
science. Participants collect sand samples from beaches using a basic protocol, and we subsequently extract and quantify microplastics in a central laboratory using the standard operating procedure."
Risk Perception of Plastic Pollution: Importance of Stakeholder Involvement and Citizen Science:
(quote) "The chapter finally discusses how risk perception can be
improved by greater stakeholder involvement and utilization of citizen
science and thereby improve the foundation for timely and efficient
societal measures."
Assessing the citizen science approach as tool to increase awareness on the marine litter problem:
(quote) "This paper provides a quantitative assessment of students'
attitude and behaviors towards marine litter before and after their
participation to SEACleaner, an educational and citizen science project
devoted to monitor macro- and micro-litter in an Area belonging to Pelagos Sanctuary."
Spatial trends and drivers of marine debris accumulation on shorelines in South Eleuthera, The Bahamas using citizen science:
(quote) "This study measured spatial distribution of marine debris
stranded on beaches in South Eleuthera, The Bahamas. Citizen science,
fetch modeling, relative exposure index and predictive mapping were used
to determine marine debris source and abundance."
Making citizen science count: Best practices and challenges of citizen science projects on plastics in aquatic environments: (quote) "Citizen science is a cost-effective way to gather data over a large geographical range while simultaneously raising public awareness on the problem".
White and wonderful? Microplastics prevail in snow from the Alps to the Arctic: (quote) "In March 2018, five samples were taken at different locations on Svalbard (Fig. 1A and Table 1) by citizen scientists embarking on a land expedition by ski-doo
(Aemalire project). The citizens were instructed on contamination
prevention and equipped with protocol forms, prerinsed 2-liter stainless
steel containers (Ecotanca), a porcelain mug, a steel spoon, and a soup
ladle for sampling."
Citizen sensing
Citizen sensing can be a form of citizen science: (quote) "The work
of citizen sensing, as a form of citizen science, then further
transforms Stengers's
notion of the work of science by moving the experimental facts and
collectives where scientific work is undertaken out of the laboratory of
experts and into the world of citizens." Similar sensing activities include Crowdsensing and participatory monitoring.
While the idea of using mobile technology to aid this sensing is not
new, creating devices and systems that can be used to aid regulation has
not been straightforward. Some examples of projects that include citizen sensing are:
Citizen Sense (2013–2018): (quote) "Practices of monitoring and
sensing environments have migrated to everyday participatory
applications, where users of smart phones and networked devices are able
to engage with modes of environmental observation and data collection."
Breathe Project: (quote) "We use the best available science and
technology to better understand the quality of the air we breathe and
provide opportunities for citizens to engage and take action."
The Bristol Approach to Citizen Sensing: (quote) "Citizen Sensing is
about empowering people and places to understand and use smart tech and
data from sensors to tackle the issues they care about, connect with
other people who can help, and take positive, practical action."
Luftdaten.info: (quote) "You and thousands of others around the
world install self-built sensors on the outside their home.
Luftdaten.info generates a continuously updated particular matter map
from the transmitted data."
CitiSense: (quote) "CitiSense aims to co-develop a participatory
risk management system (PRMS) with citizens, local authorities and
organizations which enables them to contribute to advanced climate
services and enhanced urban climate resilience as well as receive recommendations that support their security."
In a £7M programme funded by water regulator Ofwat, citizen scientists are being trained to test for pollution and over-abstraction in 10 river catchment areas in the UK. Sensors will be used and the information gathered will be available in a central visualisation platform. The project is led by The Rivers Trust and United Utilities and includes volunteers such as anglers testing the rivers they use. The Angling Trust
provides the pollution sensors, with Kristian Kent from the Trust
saying: "Citizen science is a reality of the world in the future, so
they're not going to be able to just sweep it under the carpet."
River water quality in the U.K. has been tested by a combined
total of over 7,000 volunteers in so-called "blitzes" run over two
weekends in 2024. The research by the NGO Earthwatch Europe gathered data from 4,000 freshwater sites and used standardised testing equipment provide by the NGO and Imperial College.
The second blitz in October 2024 included testing for chemical
pollutants, such as antibiotics, agricultural chemicals and pesticides.
Results from 4,531 volunteers showed that over 61% of the freshwater
sites "were in a poor state because of high levels of the nutrients
phosphate and nitrate, the main source of which is sewage effluent and
agricultural runoff". The data gathered through robust volunteer testing
is analysed and put into a report helping provide the Environment Agency with information it does not have.
Resources for computer science and scientific crowdsourcing projects concerning COVID-19 can be found on the internet or as apps. Some such projects are listed below:
The distributed computing project Folding@home
launched a program in March 2020 to assist researchers around the world
who were working on finding a cure and learning more about the coronavirus pandemic.
The initial wave of projects were meant to simulate potentially
druggable protein targets from SARS-CoV-2 (and also its predecessor and
close relation SARS-CoV, about which there is significantly more data
available). In 2024, the project has been extended to look at other health issues including Alzheimer's and cancer. The project asks volunteers to download the app and donate computing power for simulations.
The distributed computing project Rosetta@home
also joined the effort in March 2020. The project uses computers of
volunteers to model SARS-CoV-2 virus proteins to discover possible drug
targets or create new proteins to neutralize the virus. Researchers
revealed that with the help of Rosetta@home, they had been able to
"accurately predict the atomic-scale structure of an important
coronavirus protein weeks before it could be measured in the lab." In 2022, the parent Boinc company thanked contributors for donating
their computer power and helping work on the de novo protein design
including vaccine development.
The OpenPandemics – COVID-19 project is a partnership between Scripps Research and IBM's World Community Grid
for a distributed computing project that "will automatically run a
simulated experiment in the background [of connected home PCs] which
will help predict the effectiveness of a particular chemical compound as
a possible treatment for COVID-19". The project asked volunteers to donate unused computing power. In 2024, the project was looking at targeting the DNA polymerase of the cytomegalovirus to identify binders.
The Eterna OpenVaccine project enables video game players to "design
an mRNA encoding a potential vaccine against the novel coronavirus." In mid-2021, it was noted that the project had helped create a library
of potential vaccine molecules to be tested at Stanford University; SU
researchers also noted that importance of volunteers discussing the
games and exchanging ideas.
In March 2020, the EU-Citizen.Science project had "a selection of
resources related to the current COVID19 pandemic. It contains links to
citizen science and crowdsourcing projects"
The COVID-19 Citizen Science project was "a new initiative by University of California, San Francisco
physician-scientists" that "will allow anyone in the world age 18 or
over to become a citizen scientist advancing understanding of the
disease." By 2024, the Eureka platform had over 100,000 participants.
The CoronaReport digital journalism project was "a citizen science
project which democratizes the reporting on the Coronavirus, and makes
these reports accessible to other citizens." It was developed by the University of Edinburgh and asked people affected by Covid to share the social effects of the pandemic.
The COVID Symptom Tracker was a crowdsourced study of the symptoms
of the virus. It was created in the UK by King's College London and
Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals. It had two million downloads by April
2020. Within three months, information from the app had helped identify six variations of Covid. Government funding ended in early 2022, but due to the large number of
volunteers, Zoe decided to continue the work to study general health. By February 2023, over 75,000 people had downloaded the renamed Zoe Habit Tracker.
The Covid Near You epidemiology tool "uses crowdsourced data to
visualize maps to help citizens and public health agencies identify
current and potential hotspots for the recent pandemic coronavirus,
COVID-19." The site was launched in Boston in March 2020; at the end of 2020 it
was rebranded to Outbreaks Near Me and tracked both Covid and flu.
The We-Care project is a novel initiative by University of California, Davis researchers that uses anonymity and crowdsourced information to alert infected users and slow the spread of COVID-19.
COVID Radar was an app in the Netherlands, active between April 2020
and February 2022, with which users anonymously answered a short daily
questionnaire asking about their symptoms, behavior, coronavirus test
results, and vaccination status. Symptoms and behavior were visualized
on a map and users received feedback on their individual risk and
behaviors relative to the national mean. The app had over 250,000 users,
who filled out the questionnaire over 8.5 million times. Research from this app continued to be used in 2024.
The Quantified Flu project is a co-designed citizen science effort
for tracking symptoms and correlating them with physiological data from
wearable devices that was launched in April 2020 and is still ongoing.
There have been suggestions that the pandemic and subsequent
lockdown has boosted the public's awareness and interest in citizen
science, with more people around the world having the motivation and the
time to become involved in helping to investigate the illness and
potentially move on to other areas of research.
The Citizen Science Global Partnership was created in 2022; the partnership brings together networks from Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and the USA.
In South Africa
(SA), citizen science projects include: the Stream Assessment Scoring
System (miniSASS) which "encourages enhanced catchment management for water security in a climate stressed society."
The South African National Biodiversity Institute is partnered with iNaturalist
as a platform for biodiversity observations using digital photography
and geolocation technology to monitor biodiversity. Such partnerships
can reduce duplication of effort, help standardise procedures and make
the data more accessible.
Also in SA, "Members of the public, or 'citizen scientists' are helping researchers from the University of Pretoria to identify Phytophthora species present in the fynbos."
In June 2016, citizen science experts from across East Africa gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, for a symposium organised by the Tropical Biology Association (TBA) in partnership with the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
(CEH). The aim was "to harness the growing interest and expertise in
East Africa to stimulate new ideas and collaborations in citizen
science." Rosie Trevelyan of the TBA said: "We need to enhance our
knowledge about the status of Africa's species and the threats facing
them. And scientists can't do it all on their own. At the same time,
citizen science is an extremely effective way of connecting people more
closely to nature and enrolling more people in conservation action".
The website Zooniverse hosts several African citizen science projects, including: Snapshot Serengeti, Wildcam Gorongosa and Jungle Rhythms.
Nigeria
has the Ibadan Bird Club whose to aim is to "exchange ideas and share
knowledge about birds, and get actively involved in the conservation of
birds and biodiversity."
In Namibia, Giraffe Spotter.org is "project that will provide people with an online citizen science platform for giraffes".
Within the Republic of the Congo,
the territories of an indigenous people have been mapped so that "the
Mbendjele tribe can protect treasured trees from being cut down by
logging companies". An Android open-source app called Sapelli was used
by the Mbendjele which helped them map "their tribal lands and
highlighted trees that were important to them, usually for medicinal
reasons or religious significance. Congolaise Industrielle des Bois then
verified the trees that the tribe documented as valuable and removed
them from its cutting schedule. The tribe also documented illegal
logging and poaching activities."
In West Africa, the eradication of the recent outbreak of Ebola virus disease
was partly helped by citizen science. "Communities learnt how to assess
the risks posed by the disease independently of prior cultural
assumptions, and local empiricism allowed cultural rules to be reviewed,
suspended or changed as epidemiological facts emerged." "Citizen
science is alive and well in all three Ebola-affected countries. And if
only a fraction of the international aid directed at rebuilding health
systems were to be redirected towards support for citizen science, that
might be a fitting memorial to those who died in the epidemic."
The CitSci Africa Association held its International Conference in February 2024 in Nairobi.
Asia
Birdwatching in India JEG0901
The Hong Kong Birdwatching Society
was established in 1957, and is the only local civil society aiming at
appreciating and conserving Hong Kong birds and their natural
environment. Their bird surveys go back to 1958, and they carry out a number of Citizen Science events such as their yearly sparrow census.
The Bird Count India
partnership consists of a large number of organizations and groups
involved in birdwatching and bird surveys. They coordinate a number of
Citizen Science projects such as the Kerala Bird Atlas and Mysore city Bird Atlas that map the distribution and abundance of birds of entire Indian states.
RAD@homeCollaboratory is an Indian citizen science research programme in astronomy & astrophysics. Launched on 15 April 2013, by Dr Ananda Hota, this programme uses hybrid model, social media platforms and in-person training of the interested participants. In 2022, the Collaboratory, using GMRT observations and archival data from other telescopes, reported discovery of an active galactic nucleus, a radio galaxy named RAD12, spewing a large unipolar radio bubble on to its merging companion galaxy. Recently, on 2 October 2025 the Collaboratory reported discovery of the farthest and most powerful Odd Radio Circle (ORC), RAD J131346.9+500320, using the LOFAR radio telescope data.
The Taiwan
Roadkill Observation Network was founded in 2011 and has more than
16,000 members as of 2019. It is a citizen science project where roadkill across Taiwan is photographed and sent to the Endemic Species Research Institute for study. Its primary goal has been to set up an eco-friendly
path to mitigate roadkill challenges and popularize a national
discourse on environmental issues and civil participation in scientific
research. The members of the Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network volunteer to
observe animals' corpses that are by caused by roadkill or by other
reasons. Volunteers can then upload pictures and geographic locations of
the roadkill to an internet database or send the corpses to the Endemic Species Research as specimens. Because members come from different areas of the island, the collection of data serves as an animal distribution map of the island. According to the geographical
data and pictures of corpses collected by the members, the community
itself and the sponsor, the Endemic Species Center could find out the
hotspots and the reasons for the animals' deaths. One of the most
renowned cases is that the community successfully detected rabies cases due to the huge collection of data. The corpses of Melogale moschata
had accumulated for years and are thought to be carriers of rabies.
Alarmed by this, the government authority took actions to prevent the
prevalence of rabies in Taiwan. In another case in 2014, some citizen
scientists discovered birds that had died from unknown causes near an
agricultural area. The Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network cooperated
with National Pingtung University of Science and Technology
and engaged citizen scientists to collect bird corpses. The volunteers
collected 250 bird corpses for laboratory tests, which confirmed that
the bird deaths were attributable to pesticides
used on crops. This prompted the Taiwanese government to restrict
pesticides, and the Bill of Pesticide Management amendment was passed
after the third reading in the Legislative Yuan,
establishing a pesticide control system. The results indicated that
Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network had developed a set of shared
working methods and jointly completed certain actions. Furthermore, the
community of the Taiwan Roadkill Observation Network had made real
changes to road design to avoid roadkill, improved the management of
usage of pesticide, epidemic prevention, as well as other examples. By mid-2024, volunteers had observed over 293,000 animals. The network, the largest citizen science project in Taiwan, noted that
more than half of roadkill were amphibians (eg, frogs), while one third
are reptiles and birds.
The AirBox Project was launched in Taiwan to create a participatoryecosystem with a focus on PM2.5
monitoring through AirBox devices. By the end of 2014, the public had
paid more attention to the PM2.5 levels because the air pollution
problem had become worse, especially in central and southern Taiwan.
High PM2.5 levels are harmful to our health, with respiratory problems
as an example. These pollution levels aroused public concern and led to
an intensive debate about air pollution sources. Some experts suggested
that air quality was affected by pollutants from mainland China, while some environmentalists believed that it was the result of industrialization,
because of, for example, exhaust fumes from local power plants or
factories. However, no one knew the answer because of insufficient data.Dr. Ling-Jyh Chen, a researcher of the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica,
launched The AirBox Project. His original idea was inspired by a
popular Taiwanese slogan "Save Your Environment by Yourself". As an
expert in a Participatory Sensing
system, he decided to take this ground-up approach to collect PM2.5
level data, and thus through open data and data analysis to have a
better understanding of the possible air pollution sources. Using this
ecosystem, huge amounts of data was collected from AirBox devices. This
data was instantly available online, informing people of PM2.5 levels.
They could then take the proper actions, such as wearing a mask or
staying at home, preventing themselves from going out into the polluted
environment. Data can also be analyzed to understand the possible sources of pollution and provide recommendations for improving the situation. There are four main steps to this project: i)
Develop the AirBox device. Developing a device that could correctly
collect the data of the PM2.5 level was time-consuming. It had taken
more than three years to develop an AirBox that can be easily used, but
with both high accuracy and low cost. ii) The widespread
installation of AirBoxes. In the beginning, very few people were willing
to install it at their homes because of their concerns about the
possible harm to their health, power consumption and maintenance.
Because of this, AirBoxes were only installed in a relatively small
area. But with help from Taiwan's LASS (Location Aware Sensing System)
community, AirBoxes appeared in all parts of Taiwan. As of February
2017, there are more than 1,600 AirBoxes installed in more than 27
countries. iii) Open Source and Data Analysis.
All measurement results were released and visualized in real-time to
the public through different media. Data can be analyzed to trace
pollution sources. By December 2019, there were over 4,000 AirBoxes installed across the country.
Japan has a long history of citizen science involvement, the 1,200-year-old tradition of collecting records on cherry blossom flowering probably being the world's longest-running citizen science project. One of the most influential citizen science projects has also come out of Japan: Safecast. Dedicated to open citizen science for the environment, Safecast was established in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster,
and produces open hardware sensors for radiation and air-pollution
mapping. Presenting this data via a global open data network and maps
As technology and public interest grew, the CitizenScience.Asia group was set up in 2022; it grew from an initial hackathon in Hong Kong which worked on the 2016 Zika scare. The network is part of Citizen Science Global Partnership.
Europe
The English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) is widely regarded
to have been one of the earliest citizen science contributors in Europe
(see § History).
A century later, citizen science was experienced by adolescents in
Italy during the 1980s, working on urban energy usages and air
pollution.
In his book "Citizen Science", Alan Irwin considers the role that
scientific expertise can play in bringing the public and science
together and building a more scientifically active citizenry, empowering
individuals to contribute to scientific development. Since then a citizen science green paper was published in 2013, and
European Commission policy directives have included citizen science as
one of five strategic areas with funding allocated to support
initiatives through the 'Science With and For Society (SwafS)', a strand
of the Horizon 2020 programme. This includes significant awards such as the EU Citizen Science
Project, which is creating a hub for knowledge sharing, coordination,
and action. The European Citizen Science Association
(ECSA) was set up in 2014 to encourage the growth of citizen science
across Europe, to increase public participation in scientific processes,
mainly by initiating and supporting citizen science projects as well as
conducting research. ECSA has a membership of over 250 individual and
organisational members from over 30 countries across the European Union
and beyond.
Examples of citizen science organisations and associations based in Europe include the Biosphere Expeditions (Ireland), Bürger schaffen Wissen (Germany), Scivil (Belgium), Citizen Science Lab at Leiden University (Netherlands), Ibercivis (See External Links), Österreich forscht (Austria). Other organisations can be found here: EU Citizen Science.
In 2023, the European Union Prize for Citizen Science was established. Bestowed through Ars Electronica,
the prize was designed to honor, present and support "outstanding
projects whose social and political impact advances the further
development of a pluralistic, inclusive and sustainable society in
Europe".
Example projects
Garden birdwatches such as the Irish Garden Bird Survey by BirdWatch Ireland and the Big Garden Birdwatch by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds invite members of the public to record the wild birds that they see in their garden. The species are then tracked over time.
Photographs of The Northern Lights or "Aurora Borealis" over the island of Ireland taken by the public were collected by scientists in Ireland, in a project called Aurora Éire.
Water Blitz is a citizen science project by Dublin City University, where citizen scientists help collect water samples and provide their perspectives on water quality and pollution.
The Irish Hedgehog Survey coordinated by scientists at the National University of Ireland at Galway encourages recording on the distribution and health of hedgehogs in Ireland.
Latin America
Asháninka children in school
In 2015, the Asháninka people from Apiwtxa, which crosses the border between Brazil and Peru,
began using the Android app Sapelli to monitor their land. The
Ashaninka have "faced historical pressures of disease, exploitation and
displacement, and today still face the illegal invasion of their lands
by loggers and hunters. This monitoring project shows how the Apiwtxa
Ashaninka from the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Territory, Brazil, are
beginning to use smartphones and technological tools to monitor these
illegal activities more effectively."
In Argentina, two smartphone Android applications are available for citizen science. i) AppEAR has been developed at the Institute of Limnology and was launched in May 2016. Joaquín Cochero is a researcher who developed an "application that
appeals to the collaboration of users of mobile devices in collecting
data that allow the study of aquatic ecosystems" (translation). Cochero stated: "Not much of citizen science in Argentina, just a few
more oriented to astronomy specific cases. As ours is the first. And I
have volunteers from different parts of the country that are interested
in joining together to centralize data. That's great because these types
of things require many people participate actively and voluntarily"
(translation). ii) eBird was launched in 2013, and has so far identified 965 species of birds. eBird in Argentina is "developed and managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University,
one of the most important ornithological institutions in the world, and
locally presented recently with the support of the Ministry of Science,
Technology and Productive Innovation of the Nation (MINCyT)"
(translation).
In Argentina, a citizen-led initiative known as Human Cognitive
Engineering (HCE/IC-H), established in 2025, investigates biophysical
pathways such as PIEZO1 and PIEZO2 mechanotransduction. This project utilizes open-source repositories to document Prior Art,
aiming to maintain fundamental biological mechanisms as public knowledge
in alignment with UNESCO 2026 Neuro-rights standards. The framework describes human physiology through General Systems Theory
(GST), focusing on fascial signaling and the Grotthuss proton-jump
mechanism for systemic homeostasis.
Projects in Brazil include: i) Platform and mobile app 'Missions' has been developed by IBM in their São Paulo research lab with Brazil's Ministry for Environment and Innovation (BMEI). Sergio Borger, an IBM team lead in São Paulo, devised the crowdsourced
approach when BMEI approached the company in 2010. They were looking for
a way to create a central repository for the rainforest data. Users can upload photos of a plant species and its components, enter
its characteristics (such as color and size), compare it against a
catalog photo and classify it. The classification results are juried by
crowdsourced ratings. ii)
Exoss Citizen Science is a member of Astronomers Without Borders and
seeks to explore the southern sky for new meteors and radiants. Users can report meteor fireballs through uploading pictures on to a webpage or by linking to YouTube.A jaguar in Pantanal; an example of Brazilian biodiversityiii)
The Information System on Brazilian Biodiversity (SiBBr) was launched
in 2014 "aiming to encourage and facilitate the publication,
integration, access and use of information about the biodiversity of the
country." Their initial goal "was to gather 2.5 million occurrence records of
species from biological collections in Brazil and abroad up to the end
of 2016. It is now expected that SiBBr will reach nine million records
in 2016." Andrea Portela said: "In 2016, we will begin with the citizen
science. They are tools that enable anyone, without any technical
knowledge, to participate. With this we will achieve greater engagement
with society. People will be able to have more interaction with the
platform, contribute and comment on what Brazil has." iv)
The Brazilian Marine Megafauna Project (Iniciativa Pro Mar) is working
with the European CSA towards its main goal, which is the
"sensibilization of society for marine life issues" and concerns about
pollution and the over-exploitation of natural resources. Having started as a project monitoring manta ray, it now extends to whale shark and educating schools and divers within the Santos area. Its social media activities include a live streaming of a citizen science course to help divers identify marine megafauna. v) A smartphone app called Plantix has been developed by the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) which helps Brazilian farmers discover crop diseases quicker and helps fight them more efficiently. Brazil is a very large agricultural exporter, but between 10 and 30% of crops fail because of disease. "The database currently includes 175 frequently occurring crop diseases and pests as well as 40,000 photos. The identification algorithm
of the app improves with every image which records a success rate of
over 90 per cent as of approximately 500 photos per crop disease." vi) In an Atlantic Ocean forest region in Brazil, an effort to map the genetic riches of soil is under way. The Drugs From Dirt initiative, based at the Rockefeller University, seeks to turn up bacteria that yield new types of antibiotics – the Brazilian region being particularly rich in potentially useful bacterial genes. Approximately a quarter of the 185 soil samples have been taken by Citizen Scientists without which the project could not run.
In Chile citizen science projects include (some websites in Spanish): i) Testing new cancer therapies with scientists from the Science Foundation for Life. ii) Monitoring the population of the Chilean bumblebee. iii) Monitoring the invasive ladybird Chinita arlequín. iv) Collecting rain water data. v) Monitoring various pollinating fly populations. vi) Providing information and field data on the abundance and distribution of various species of rockfish. vii) Investigating the environmental pollution by plastic litter.
Projects in Colombia include (some websites in Spanish): i)
The Communications Project of the Humboldt Institute along with the
Organization for Education and Environmental Protection initiated
projects in the Bogotáwetlands of Cordoba and El Burro, which have a lot of biodiversity. ii) In the Model Forest of Risaralda, the Colombia 'proyecto de Ciencia Abierta y Colaborativa'
promotes citizen participation in research related to how the local
environment is adapting to climate change. The first meeting took place
in the Flora and Fauna Sanctuary Otún Quimbaya. iii) The Citizen Network Environmental Monitoring (CLUSTER), based in the city of Bucaramanga, seeks to engage younger students in data science, who are trained in building weather stations with open repositories based on free software and open hardware data. iv) The Symposium on Biodiversity has adapted the CS tool iNaturalist for use in Colombia. v) The Sinchi Amazonic Institute of Scientific Research
seeks to encourage the development and diffusion of knowledge, values
and technologies on the management of natural resources for ethnic
groups in the Amazon. This research should further the use of
participatory action research schemes and promoting participation
communities.
Since 2010, the Pacific Biodiversity Institute (PBI) seeks
"volunteers to help identify, describe and protect wildland complexes
and roadless areas in South America". The PBI "are engaged in an
ambitious project with our Latin American conservation partners to map
all the wildlands in South America, to evaluate their contribution to
global biodiversity and to share and disseminate this information."
In Mexico, a citizen science project has monitored rainfall data that is linked to a hydrologic payment for ecosystem services project.
Conferences
The first Conference on Public Participation in Scientific Research was held in Portland, Oregon, in August 2012. Citizen science is now often a theme at large conferences, such as the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
In November 2015, the ETH Zürich and University of Zürich hosted an international meeting on the "Challenges and Opportunities in Citizen Science".
The first citizen science conference hosted by the Citizen
Science Association was in San Jose, California, in February 2015 in
partnership with the AAAS conference. The Citizen Science Association conference, CitSci 2017, was held in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States, between 17 and 20 May 2017. The conference had more than 600 attendees.The next CitSci was in March 2019 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The platform "Österreich forscht" hosts the annual Austrian citizen science conference since 2015.
In popular culture
Barbara Kingsolver's 2012 novel Flight Behaviour
looks at the effects of citizen science on a housewife in Appalachia,
when her interest in butterflies brings her into contact with scientists
and academics.
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