Designing a Platform for Ethical Citizen Science: A Case Study of CitSci.org

Abstract

Involving the public in scientific discovery offers opportunities for engagement, learning, participation, and action. Since its launch in 2007, the CitSci.org platform has supported hundreds of community-driven citizen science projects involving thousands of participants who have generated close to a million scientific measurements around the world. Members using CitSci.org follow their curiosities and concerns to develop, lead, or simply participate in research projects. While professional scientists are trained to make ethical determinations related to the collection of, access to, and use of information, citizen scientists and practitioners may be less aware of such issues and more likely to become involved in ethical dilemmas. In this era of big and open data, where data sharing is encouraged and open science is promoted, privacy and openness considerations can often be overlooked. Platforms that support the collection, use, and sharing of data and personal information need to consider their responsibility to protect the rights to and ownership of data, the provision of protection options for data and members, and at the same time provide options for openness. This requires critically considering both intended and unintended consequences of the use of platforms, data, and volunteer information. Here, we use our journey developing CitSci.org to argue that incorporating customization into platforms through flexible design options for project managers shifts the decision-making from top-down to bottom-up and allows project design to be more responsive to goals. To protect both people and data, we developed-and continue to improve-options that support various levels of "open" and "closed" access permissions for data and membership participation. These options support diverse governance styles that are responsive to data uses, traditional and indigenous knowledge sensitivities, intellectual property rights, personally identifiable information concerns, volunteer preferences, and sensitive data protections. We present a typology for citizen science openness choices, their ethical considerations, and strategies that we are actively putting into practice to expand privacy options and governance models based on the unique needs of individual projects using our platform.

Citizen Science Platforms

“…mobile apps, low-cost sensors, games, and gamification) have been developed to facilitate interaction and communication between citizens and scientist and to expand the scale and scope of project and protocol design, data collection, information delivery, data processing, and visualisation (Newman et al 2012;Bowser et al 2013;Eveleigh et al 2014). Furthermore, a wide range of resources, guidelines, and handbooks have been published for data and metadata management (Wiggins et al 2013;Schade and Tsinaraki 2016), the establishment of data and metadata standards (Cavalier et al 2015), data quality assurance and control (EPA 2019), and ethical data practices (Lynn et al 2019). It is obvious from the growing number of new technological developments that citizen science infrastructures are increasingly in demand.…”

“…Zooniverse). In addition, citizen science platforms can function as a mutual learning space providing useful resources about citizen science, including tools and guidelines, good practices, and training modules, such as CitSci.org (Lynn et al 2019), SciStarter, and the Austrian citizen science platform Österreich forscht. Another category of citizen science platforms is comprised of those platforms that are commercially available, such as SPOTTERON and CitizenLab, which combine both technology aspects and tools.…”

“…Ideally, platforms promote value-creating collaborations, which then feedback to motivate wider participation (Nederlof et al 2011;Ansell and Gash 2018). To make a citizen science platform as useful as possible, both the citizen science projects and activities it displays, but also the additional materials available on the platformsuch as information about citizen science, information about how to start a citizen science project, as well as information on ethical or juridical issues (Lynn et al 2019) need a certain level of quality (Heigl et al 2018a, b). In addition, communication about the citizen science platform must also be of good quality to ensure consistent information uptake.…”

Unregulated Health Research Using Mobile Devices: Ethical Considerations and Policy Recommendations

“…These include, but are not limited to, recommendations that digital health information be accurate; 148 that experts (in experimental design, data analysis, research ethics) be accessible; 149 and that the most appropriate ethical frameworks/governance structures for any given project will vary depending on the characteristics of the researchers, participants, and research design. 150 Differences between traditional research and citizen/ community/patient-directed studies have led some to question whether the traditional paradigm of ethical review (e.g., IRB/REC involvement) is appropriate in participant-led initiatives. 151 Some have argued that IRB/REC involvement may "promote decisions specific to data ownership, data management, and informed consent that directly conflict with the aims of research that is explicitly participant-led."…”

Citizen Scientist or Citizen Technician: A Case Study of Communication on One Citizen Science Platform

“…Because CitSci. org has these different functions and governance capabilities, it can support a diverse array of projects (Lynn et al 2019) and in turn can collect metadata across projects to conduct informative meta-analyses (Newman et al 2012). CitSci.org is an appropriate platform for such a study because it can support studies across an array of projects with different types of volunteer tasks.…”