Still in Need of Norms: The State of the Data in Citizen Science

Abstract

This article offers an assessment of current data practices in the citizen science, community science, and crowdsourcing communities. We begin by reviewing current trends in scientific data relevant to citizen science before presenting the results of our qualitative research. Following a purposive sampling scheme designed to capture data management practices from a wide range of initiatives through a landscape sampling methodology (Bos et al. 2007), we sampled 36 projects from English-speaking countries. The authors used a semi-structured protocol to interview project proponents (either scientific leads or data managers) to better understand how projects are addressing key aspects of the data lifecycle, reporting results through descriptive statistics and other analyses. Findings suggest that citizen science projects are doing well in terms of data quality assessment and governance, but are sometimes lacking in providing open access to data outputs, documenting data, ensuring interoperability through data standards, or building robust and sustainable infrastructure. Based on this assessment, the paper presents a number of recommendations for the citizen science community related to data quality, data infrastructure, data governance, data documentation, and data access.

The Critical Importance of Citizen Science Data

“…The complete description of research findings can be found in the journal article by Bowser et al (2020). In addition, as a complementary practical resource the TG offered a summary of recommendations in six areas of the data lifecycle.…”

“…1 The interest was in evaluating CS practices throughout the data lifecycle. To that end, the Task Group (TG) conducted a survey of data collection, validation, curation, and management practices for a sample of 36 CS projects globally representing different research domains, types of CS practices, and regions (results published in Bowser et al, 2020).…”

Development of Privacy Features on Anecdata.org, a Free Citizen Science Platform for Collecting Datasets for Climate Change and Related Projects

“…governance, data documentation, data access, data services, and data integration (Bowser et al, 2020).…”

A framework for assessing the commons qualities of citizen science: comparative analysis of five digital platforms

“…Data and knowledge resources generated through public participation represent the foundation of CS, often recognised as an important aspect of the open science agenda (Mirowski, 2018). However, recent evidence suggests that CS projects are sometimes failing to provide open access to research outputs and/or in proper formats (Bowser et al, 2020;Groom et al, 2017). What is unique to CS is, indeed, that the community of citizen scientists has an active stake in the production of data as co-producers (not only as taxpayers, as in the open access debate), which highlights extra ethical and legal challenges for knowledge access and reuse (Riesch & Potter, 2014).…”

“…What is unique to CS is, indeed, that the community of citizen scientists has an active stake in the production of data as co-producers (not only as taxpayers, as in the open access debate), which highlights extra ethical and legal challenges for knowledge access and reuse (Riesch & Potter, 2014). At the same time, open data practices and data management policies may help to prevent misconceptions regarding data sharing (Bowser et al, 2020), increase project's success (Theobald et al, 2015), and motivate initial, continued, and renewed engagement in CS projects (De Vries et al, 2019). A crucial element for favouring data access and reuse is to implement explicit data management policies (Bowser et al, 2020) with standard licences and no restrictions on commercial usage, but requiring attribution and 'share alike' formats (Groom et al, 2017).…”