Citizen Science

During the past decade the number of citizen science projects around the world has surged. Today there are thousands of initiatives catalogued in databases such as SciStarter.org and EU-Citizen.science, enterprises of which the majority are directly or indirectly linked to scientific research projects. However, citizen science is not a completely novel way of conducting collaborative research; it has been around since the beginning of the scientific revolution and historical data collected by volunteers from the 19th century is used in contemporary research. While citizen science has been most widely used in biodiversity research, conservation, and environmental sciences in need of large-scale observations and monitoring, the approach has today entered a very diverse set of disciplines ranging from the humanities and the social sciences to geography, astronomy, epidemiology, and do-it-yourself technology research. This is largely a consequence of the recent rise and diffusion of digital technologies and communities, notably the Zooniverse.org platform, which makes online classificatory citizen science projects possible at a feasible cost and with a low barrier for mass participation. Consequently, citizen science as a method for collecting and classifying data is in its current state a research design applicable to more or less any empirical line of inquiry. However, volunteer participation in science requires additional considerations to be made that address issues such as the quality of data collected or classified by nonscientists, research ethics concerning attribution and participation in the research design, and ownership of data and results. Furthermore, the expectations of impact may differ between the scientific goals and the participating public’s desire for changes in, for example, environmental policy or species conservation. In 2016 the journal Citizen Science Theory and Practice was launched by the Citizen Science Association, in which current research on the phenomenon is published.