Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do Citizen Science Platforms Exist? (arstechnica.com)
Loren Chorley writes: After reading about a new surge in the trend for citizen science (also known as community science, civic science or networked science), I was intrigued by the idea and wondered if there are websites that do this in a crowd sourced and open sourced manner. I know sites like YouTube allow people to show off their scientific experiments, but they don't facilitate uploading all their data or linking studies together to draw more advanced conclusions, or making methodologies like you'd see in academia straight forward and available through a simple interface. What about rating of experiments for peer review, revisions and refinement, requirement lists, step-by-step instructions for repeatability, ease of access, and simple language for people who don't find academia accessible? Does something like this exist already? Do you, Slashdot, think this is something useful, or that people are interested in? Or would the potential for fraud and misinformation be too great?
Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.
The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Check out Zooniverse - https://www.zooniverse.org/ - there's a lot of projects that are helped by citizen science. A nice platform where human powered processing can contribute. I don't think there's the kind of review etc you're asking for, but it does have a very nice interface for building your own project, contributing to others etc.
Public science exists, the platform is $publication and $reproduce.results; and yes, there is inherent risk from erroneous data and from bad actors.
Good luck getting around publishing rights in academia
As noble a gesture this would be - the internet is basically a giant web of misinformation today and Claim A from clueless individual A often has as much weight as a nobel prize winner in terms of well this guy says this but this guy counters. Its created an atmosphere of everythings fake, everyones corrupt, nothing means anything and this would unfortunately most likely make our current disastrous situation even worse.
There's a trend in the academic community towards that are known as science gateways. It's not well defined what a science gateway is, but they often integrate computational science tools and infrastructure (HPC, Globus online data transfer, visualization, etc.).
I'm currently working on a project that utilizes one such science gateway platform from Purdue known as HUBzero. It's essentially a CMS tailored towards science (branched from Joomla!). Their FOSS release has virtually no community and a lot of shortcomings (and bugs), but it's usable and includes a lot that would be useful for citizen science groups, including a publication system with DOI creation, project management for files, user/groip management, messaging, etc. Perhaps this is similar to what you're looking for.
I wonder if the very concepts that a phrase like "community science" might directly contradict the concept of any one provider facilitating all things surrounding projects. It (in my mind) might be a resounding "yes", simply because we all tend to have the basic things to facilitate the ability to share ideas.
For example, I have access to the internet, so I have access to web browsers, which gives me access to forums, blogs, libraries etc; as well as well supported protocols like SMTP, FTP, XMPP etc.
I think when it comes to community focused learning, development or whatever, it's important to ensure that the community actively working and maintaining it retains control over how it's worked with. We also have many, many services around which can be used to maintain finished works, or manage ongoing work for archival purposes...
just my two cents...
Just look (deep) at fusor.net to see what has happened to open science in America. Now if an amateur has a legitimate breakthrough, they can't talk about it openly without paying $30k and waiting 8 years for a patent grant. Otherwise its stolen by a commercial interest in the field. "First to File" is one of the worst things to happen in this country, and I'm saying that as someone with one issued patent and more in the pipeline. Its bad.
Here's one active effort:
https://citizensciencetahoe.or...
They have an app for "citizens" to collect data about water quality at Lake Tahoe. They post the results on the web site.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Actually, "First to File" is doesn't seem to be the problem you think it is at all. "First to Invent" was a problem because it invited fraud. You could find something in the open world, and pre-date your date of invention by up to 364 days from date of filing. Thus, you could claim priority over the open work. Now, the open work is always prior art on an application made after it becomes publicly available.
Bruce Perens.
. . . more crackpot "scientists". The universities are overflowing with 'em.
Slashdot publishes their baloney on a daily basis.
Also, if you actually intend to file a patent, it was never a good idea to make disclosures before filing. Besides putting doubt on whether your invention actually is an invention, the duration during which your patent can effectively be enforced runs from the data of disclosure rather than the date of filing or grant.
Bruce Perens.
As soon as you file, you can talk about it though, right?
Encouraging random wackos to think of themselves as "scientists" is a recipe for - at best - a shitload of wasted time from everyone involved. There's a reason scientific research careers have been gated behind many years of education for centuries. The "hard" sciences need lots of education and (usually) access to expensive research equipment to even understand the current state of things, much less make real progress, and the "soft" sciences are already largely built on statistical anomalies and unrepeatable studies, and throwing in thousands of amateurs with no concept of proper methodology to begin with is the last thing that's going to improve that.
There's probably a not-insignificant number of unemployed PhDs out there who would still like to work as amateurs, but creating a big public ecosystem to accommodate them would immediately become swarmed with a million crackpots who think they've solved the Riemann Hypothesis with undergrad calculus or built a warp drive out of a Roomba.
There are various professional amateur collaborations depending on your field of interest. In astronomy there's the Society for Astronomical Sciences. There's GLOBE which is also oriented towards students. I'm vaguely aware of opportunities to do field work in archeology and paleontology. The Economist had a DIY science article in their recent Christmas issue about low cost sensors. I don't know if this meets your "crowd/open sourced" buzzword criteria or what a "resurgence in fringe ideas" has to do with citizen science.
While it's not general-purpose, there is Ham radio Science Citizen Investigation, "a platform for the publicity and promotion of projects that are consistent with the following objectives:
Advance scientific research and understanding through amateur radio activities;
Encourage the development of new technologies to support this research; and
Provide educational opportunities for the amateur community and the general public."
If you are looking for a more universal organization, you might look at this organization's means and methods for some ideas.
In the same way that there isn't a simple interface to methodologies and projects in academia or science in general, I doubt you'll see one in citizen/community science.
That said, there are some remarkable projects (or umbrella projects) that are purpose-built for the projects they support. Large-scale ones (besides Zooniverse, already mentioned) include:
https://www.inaturalist.org/ — observations of living organisms
https://ebird.org/ — the world of bird observations
The observations on those two sites are contributing significantly to real science outcomes.
Generally, science is distributed through trade publications, not patents. The intent is different for the two.
Publications announce new results and discuss the analysis behind them. Whereas patents announce new inventions and defend their utility.
Look, I understand your frustration with the arduous and lengthy process of filing and obtaining a patent. But let's not confuse patents with peer-reviewed scientific papers.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
With the possible exception for militarily-applicable research, no science should be government-sponsored. At all.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
About 5 years, we set out to create a platform that both scientists and citizen-scientists could use to collaborate on research. Most of the projects run on Liquid were large groups of citizen scientists organized and lead by teams of scientists. Several of the projects had hundreds of volunteers collecting data around the globe.
Unfortunately, we were never able to figure out the business model to make it work, so we will shutting in the next month or two.
I still believe this is a problem that hasn't yet been solved. We made a pretty good effort at it and had some success. Hopefully there will continue to be other platforms that come along that better enable scientists and citizen scientists to work together.
anecdata.org is another platform that seems pretty good.
Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.
The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.
And all of the "real science" that encourages citizen participation only has the citizens doing trivial things.
Things like running "Folding@Home", viewing astronomical photographs looking for potentially interesting things, sending in local samples for analysis - things that any high-school kid could do.
Find something in the astronomical photograph and you'll be listed as the discoverer, along with the *real* scientist who did the analysis. Send in a sample and you'll be listed as the contributor, along with the *real* scientists who wrote the paper.
(St. Louis zoo was passing out vials, asking people to find local samples of algae and send them back to be cultured. They were looking for high-yield cultures that could be used for aquaculture. A fine idea, and interesting for a child, but not actual citizen science.)
I've seen a bunch of YouTube videos that did brilliant technical comparisons of techniques or materials. One in particular - that I can't find at the moment - had everything one would need for a paper: background, hypothesis, test, measurement, and results. It would make a typical paper in materials science, except it was in video format. It was simple, concise, and had a clear result. (Update: it's here.)
If you want a platform for citizen science, you might try Hackaday.io. They are trying to start an actual scientific journal to collect some of the results that amateurs are coming up with, The Hackaday Journal of What You Don't Know.
Whether the journal goes anywhere is anybody's guess, but the .io system has a lot of cool scientific projects that might make for good research. Such as this one, or this one.
iâ(TM)m a card carrying scientist by day and i miss the self-experimentation platform called studycure that died sometime in 2012. the svc offered an inventory of pplâ(TM)s studies to replicate, protocol templates, and support for data collection + analysis
https://mobile.twitter.com/studycure
Yes, I like the idea. Please create your website. Hell, I'll even help you if you need it. Also, shameless plug for the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers and Ham Sci who are doing stuff you describe.
There is https://bugguide.net/ which tracks the ecology and distribution of insects. Volunteers submit insect photographs which are identified and categorized and mapped.
Submit to bioxrv or arXiv, anyone can publish today. What matters is whether you have anything to actually publish.
Citizen science is awesome. Science is one of the few things things that humans have created that creates real hope our species can go far. Science should be as accessible as possible to individuals, whether or not they want to participate in academics or formal research efforts. That being said, I think that that "citizen science" is about viable as "citizen ASIC design". Not much low hanging fruit for an individual in his garage at this point.
Hi, Loren. I am going through the responses to your thoughtful question, and am sort of imagining your reaction as unimpressed by the answers (please correct me if I am wrong).
The fact of the matter is that we live in a unique time insofar as we have more access to information and wisdom from crowds than ever before. You might imagine that this explosion of resources should have some disruptive effect upon the way that science is done today -- something that mirrors what Amazon did to e-commerce when it commercialized the long tail ... the argument being that since specialist scientists are essentially laypeople outside of their specializations, it's conceivable that "the crowd" can outperform these specialist communities when it comes to problem-solving tasks which involve a great amount of synthesis and generalist knowledge (which is honestly not today highly valued in academia). If you've had any of these thoughts, then realize that you are not completely alone: In fact, Rob Spencer at Pfizer has I think very well documented that the crowd can indeed be mined for solutions to some of the most challenging technical challenges. Pfizer has been doing just that for some years already, and they claim that the approach works.
Before continuing, I want to differentiate the two fundamentally different types of "citizen science". It can be either top-down or bottom-up. Top-down citizen science is just laypeople doing the legwork for some pre-existing academic work (many of the answers refer to this sort of work). I would argue that the far more interesting vision for citizen science involves enlisting the support of crowds towards solving certain problems which the critics of modern science have argued academia is itself struggling to address, and I call this approach "bottom-up". For the rest of this post, I will specifically focus upon bottom-up citizen science.
I would argue that learning the most common and most poignant critiques of modern science must be the first step towards designing a citizen science crowdsourcing platform, for the simple reason that laypeople are never going to completely replace the specialist. What you really want to achieve with these sorts of projects is a synergistic effect from combining the wisdom of crowds with the power of specialist science. An approach which fixes one or more observable problems with modern science could produce such an effect. But, like I said, to be sure that you are in the right ballpark, you have to become an expert in critiques of modern science. This first step is actually the one which Slashdotters seem to have the most difficulty with, and it is likely the reason why the answers to your question are not so great (sorry guys, downvote me if you must, but I am being honest).
If this is seeming too vague to be actionable, it may be useful to dig into a specific example. One very serious problem with the modern science approach is the infamous "publish or perish" problem:
There is a lot of good citizen science happens. One such organization is CoCoRaHS, where citizens with rain gauges add a lot more resolution to precipitation maps. Think one rainfall report for a town versus several reports all over town. The data has been used in a variety of ways. I find it interesting comparing my daily results with my neighbor 4 blocks away. Most the time there is no difference, but sometimes there is a significant difference.
(1) Safecast (unfortunately motivated by disaster, but most environmental monitoring spikes after such events): https://blog.safecast.org/ . (2) EnviroDIY (water quality and quantity related; believe they are developing data portal): https://www.envirodiy.org/ . (3) Wunderground has citizen network of weather stations. Not completely open, but they (proprietary company) update forecasts more often than gov't agencies due to automated data collection. The first example has been examined by peer-review ( http://iopscience.iop.org/arti... ). While absolute values are questionable with in situ sensors, the deltas with a large user base (and preferably different sensor manufacturers) would at least cause the academic community to raise their eyebrows.
A project supported by the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) called midata.coop is a transperent and cooperative platform that stores personal health data in a cooperative manner. At the moment running the largest Citizen Science project in Switzerland. They examine allergies caused by plant pollen with a smartphone application (https://allyscience.ch/).
There's a common misunderstanding that published science is always done by well trained professionals in well outfitted labs. That's not the case.
Most authors on scientific papers are graduate students. These are by definition untrained people new to scientific research. Most paper authors don't have a PhD. Most science labs are stocked with decades out of date equipment. It's pretty trivial to build better equipment on your own with a bit of engineering knowledge and some searching of scientific surplus stores for specialty parts.
The most difficult thing in science is to get paid to do the research. That's what academia is good for. If you don't need to get paid, don't worry about it.
Publishing isn't hard. Just keep submitting to journals until you find one that will take your paper, look for double-blind review systems. The editor will know who you are, but the reviewers will not.
Patents were invented so that capitalists could profit from inventions that they themselves did not create. If you are an inventor and using patents, you are doing it wrong.
Consider citsci.org.
All your attention are belong to my old internet meme.
AKA flat earth nutjob. If that is what you mean, read the article instead of just the headline and you will find several sites of similar more-than-a-bubble-off-center friends to play with.
If not, please clarify.
There are many that use citizens/public/us to look at blood flows in mice brains for Alzheimer research, as well as SETI and protein folding.
Good luck.
I participate here.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Your choice if you want to make some gridcoin
Life is like a big long meeting, nothing gets done and nobody's opinion gets changed.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
+5 Sad But True
What about rating of experiments for peer review, revisions and refinement, requirement lists, step-by-step instructions for repeatability, ease of access, and simple language for people who don't find academia accessible? Does something like this exist already?
For methods and protocols, there's protocols.io.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Next year the eVscope hopefully will make it debut. A telescope that will allow regular people to contribute to science. I bought one via kickstarter. https://unistellaroptics.com/
Genetic genealogy is a solid example of citizen based data acquisition and analysis. Recently GEDmatch.com was in the news for identification of unknown individuals. :-) Publications related to the analysis of the 1000 genomes data set and 10's of thousands of new high resolution y-chromsome have and are advancing the knowledge around the expansion of paternal haplogroups from ancient to modern times. ytree.net is an example of citizen science based analysis of thousands of results. Full mitochondrial dna results in genebank are dominated by submissions from individual testers which have allowed for the broad expansion of the mtDNA phylotree.
Yes. And further amend it.
The Open Science Framework exists: https://osf.io/
The Volunteer Science project [https://volunteerscience.com/] is a citizen science project that engages in science education and and tries to advance social science research by actively involving citizens in social science research projects.
SciStarter.com is a clearing house and gateway for projects, who also do some curation and outreach for the projects on the site. I've used them to support a project, they're great.
Others mentioned Zooniverse.com, which I've played with. Sites I haven't used yet that look interesting: Sciencegateways.org/resources/catalog lists resources including Virtual Research Environments and software. CitizenScience.gov has stuff too.
Public Lab is probably the best known - https://publiclab.org/. Here's how they describe themselves: Public Lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms.
I wrote an article about the DIY science community last year that tells you a bit more about how they and other "community science" outfits got started. (If the site asks you to subscribe just clear your cache).
The main platform that birders use is Ebird (https://ebird.org/home). Birders are somewhat self regulating in that we are pretty well versed in what is common and what is rare or improbable. And the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, which at over 100 years is said to be the world's largest and longest running citizen science project, has provided a lot of data in that time about changing bird populations.
As a member of a mushroom club, we regularly gather info about populations, species variation and can even make some taxonomic recommendations. The problem is that there's no good place to communicate the information. I'm sure the same is true about population studies from birdwatchers, fishermen, hunters, et.al.
here's some stuff, no guarantee of quality
Plant/Animal Crowdsourcing: (first three have phone apps, that's where most functionality is)
http://identify.plantnet-project.org/
https://www.inaturalist.org/
http://www.projectnoah.org/
http://www.wildme.org/
Specific projects:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cosalux.welovestars
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.noaa.ngdc.wmm2
Crowdsourcing platforms:
https://scistarter.com/
http://www.citsci.org/
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects
There are a lot more than this, but I'll leave these here - not that they are "pure" - some are just teaching existing knowledge and encouraging new people. My "thing" is non-thermal fusion so...the second one of these is my site. http://www.fusor.net/board/ind... - fusor.org, helping beginners, some new science. http://www.coultersmithing.com... My site for a little more advanced user (no, I'm not pimping for members unless you're a super content contributor). Neither accept money or show ads....
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Historically, smaller ships could out maneuver a larger, more dangerous ship, I don't see anything negative about smaller, more flexible, groups.. They could even temporary get together, and forming a "large" group, if more money and man/woman power is needed for a project.
"Ask Slashdot: Do Citizen Science Platforms Exist?" Start a blog. Plop whatever sciencey stuff you want on there. Cross-post to social media (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) and video platforms (e.g. YouTube). Done.
If it works, you win a Nobel prize for something. If it gets debunked, you accept that too and move on.
There are lots of opportunities to contribute (either your personal data, or code/tech.) There are open APIs to let you design opt-in activities using everything from step data off of personal devices to entire genomes.
https://www.openhumans.org/ [openhumans.org]
OBJ DISCLAIMER: I was just elected to the OH Board of Directors...
Yes Loren,
There are Citizen Science project coordination web sites see https://www.discoverycircle.org.au/
Natural Resource Management regions also have project community sites http://www.naturalresources.sa.gov.au/eyrepeninsula/get-involved/citizen-science?BestBetMatch=citizen%20science|4d090124-f3d8-4557-9b86-0d101df97e20|46d71422-ee72-40ae-9a97-a32b00c7f5a3|en-AU
A lot of the data generated is uploaded to Atlas of Living Australia https://www.ala.org.au/
Cheers,
Glen