Research organisations must adapt to reap citizen science benefits
The participation of the public or community groups, often as volunteers providing data, observations or analysis contributing to the whole scientific process, has become important for many research institutions. It is also useful for helping to close the gap between science and society. But research organisations need institutional change to successfully integrate citizen science. “Institutional adoption of citizen science requires a culture of change, new organisational structures and new models of governance,” according to TIME4CS project coordinator Alessio Livio Spera, project manager at the www.apre.it (Agency for the Promotion of European Research) (APRE) in Rome, Italy. “Citizen science faces some scepticism, if not pure resistance, from researchers for a variety of reasons. So it’s not enough to promote a new research methodology, it needs the structure,” he says. Another big challenge is motivating people within research organisations to consider citizen science. “The whole citizen science concept is still not well known in research organisations or perceived as something very far away from them,” Spera explains.
Mentoring of research organisations
"Changing structures and mindsets to expand the view of researchers outside their lab requires mentoring to build stronger alliances with research institutions for the benefit of both," he notes. “On one side, we had the ‘front runners’ – experienced research organisations with a long history of, and expertise with, a lot of citizen science projects. On the other side, we had the ‘implementers’ – research organisations with less experience but willing to embed citizen science in their own institutions.” Even the more experienced research organisations benefited from this mentoring, he remarks. As part of the European Commission’s commitment to Open Science, “if two proposals are submitted under the same topic, the one implementing citizen science practices is statistically more likely to gain a higher score,” Spera says. “So citizen science’s added value is real. But the requirements are changing, and even experienced research organisations must adapt.”
Build a community for citizen science
Another key approach is building local, national and international networks to reinforce collaborations between institutions and citizen science groups. He explains that at the beginning of the project, the idea was to pave the way for citizen science, so the objectives were more general – to increase knowledge about citizen science and institutional changes and start supporting less experienced partners. “But when the ball started rolling, we realised things could be bigger. We never thought we would be able to build such a big community so fast.” He adds: “We have done more than we expected because people were happy to work together and achieve results, which proved to be key.” The first Citizen Science Helix was built by – and is still hosted on – the artificial intelligence-powered Crowdhelix platform. The platform fosters collaboration within a helix or field by sharing key results and findings on the platform, and identifying partners and collaboration opportunities. The Citizen Science Helix has rapidly expanded into a network of 822 experts from 253 organisations in 51 countries.
Resources to institutionalise citizen science
The project also built its own open-source knowledge base, bringing together a large number of training and other resources, for example how to develop a citizen science project, increase funding for citizen science and establish an institutional ‘citizen science champion’ or contact point. Together with the INCENTIVE project which was set up to establish citizen science hubs in research organisations, recommendations on what works best for institutional adoption of citizen science were published. “We shared training resources, including webinars, on specific citizen science-related topics, for use outside the community. The project’s documents were hugely popular, downloaded thousands of times, including by people outside the project and even outside Europe,” Spera adds. The resources included a ‘reflection tool’ to help devise and implement a roadmap for institutional change. This was downloaded more than 700 times and successfully piloted at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy during the last months of the project.
Keywords
TIME4CS, citizen science, Open Science, Crowdhelix, institutional change
