Opinions of citizen scientists on open access to UK butterfly and moth occurrence data

Abstract

Citizen science plays an increasingly important role in biodiversity research and conservation, enabling large volumes of data to be gathered across extensive spatial scales in a cost-effective manner. Open access increases the utility of such data, informing land-use decisions that may affect species persistence, enhancing transparency and encouraging proliferation of research applications. However, open access provision of recent, fine-scale spatial information on the locations of species may also prompt legitimate concerns among contributors regarding possible unintended negative conservation impacts, violations of privacy and commercial exploitation of volunteer-gathered data. Here we canvas the attitudes towards open access of contributors (104 regional coordinators and 510 recorders) of species occurrence records to two of the largest citizen science biodiversity recording schemes, the UK's Butterflies for the New Millennium project and National Moth Recording Scheme. We find that while the majority of participants expressed support for open access in principle, most were more cautious in practice, preferring to limit the spatial resolution of records, particularly of threatened species, and restrict commercial reuse of data. In addition, citizen scientists' opinions differed between UK countries, taxonomic groups and the level of involvement volunteers had in the schemes. In order to maintain successful and democratic citizen science schemes, organisers, funders and data users must understand and respect participants' expectations and aspirations regarding open data while seeking to optimise data use for scientific and societal benefits.

Perspective: The Power (Dynamics) of Open Data in Citizen Science

“…Few studies have examined volunteer perspectives on the handling of citizen science data. Fox et al (2019) found that volunteers in a large-scale UK project supported open access in principle but for its practice supported cautionary actions to protect sensitive information and restrict commercial reuse of data. Groom et al (2017) reviewed the open access nature of biodiversity observation data contributed to GBIF (one of largest biodiversity data repositories).…”

Open Data Practices among Users of Primary Biodiversity Data

“…The publishing rate of original data collected with citizen science was somewhat higher than average, although still fewer than half of the articles based on original citizen science published their data. This is problematic, because studies have shown that citizen science participants generally expect and want their data to be made available for research, conservation, and policymaking (Chandler et al 2017 , Ganzevoort et al 2017 , Groom et al 2017 , Fox et al 2019 , Larson et al 2020 ). Further integration of citizen science with open biodiversity data aggregators should therefore be a priority.…”

The Citizen Observatory: Enabling Next Generation Citizen Science

“…Open Science (Nosek et al, 2015) is an ongoing initiative that seeks to make the results of scientific endeavours accessible to all; open data is one critical dimension that envisages data being made available without copyright or any other restrictions. While it is often assumed that data produced by the CitSci community are freely available, this is often not the case as the community can face hurdles in making their data open and freely available (Fox et al, 2019;Pearce-Higgins et al, 2018). A study by Groom et al (2017) of datasets in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (https://www.gbif.org/) indicated that datasets from the volunteer community are amongst the most restrictive in the way they could be used.…”