Citizen science is an umbrella term covering a broad range of practices, all related to engaging individuals actively in scientific research. There is a tension about the nature and scope of participation in citizen science, with the majority of projects being scientific authority-driven crowdsourcing approaches, allowing individuals to perform only narrowly defined microtasks. On the other side of the spectrum, there is peer production: A decentralized way of production that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals, known for example from open source software or Wikipedia.In this article, we inspect three online citizen science platforms - iNaturalist, Public Lab and Zooniverse - from a peer production perspective. We introduce a working model of peer production ecosystems that we apply to perform qualitative analyses of the projects’ online platforms. Our results show that peer production is partly already practiced in citizen science today and we provide concrete examples of features. The amount of peer production elements vary strongly between the case studies, relative to orientation of the projects as a support for professional researchers or for community activism. We argue for the potential of peer production approaches for more inclusive and democratic citizen science and aim to orient readers on why and how they might put peer production elements into practice in their own citizen science projects.
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