What Can the Audubon Bird Count Teach Us About Open Science? – NLM Musings from the Mezzanine

"Perhaps the best known and oldest citizen science project is the Audubon Bird Count. Begun as an alternative to the holiday hunting traditions, this project engages citizens around the world, in well-structured bird circles, who go to their local woods and neighborhoods to create a wildlife census. Now in its 117th year, the Audubon Bird Count has been spectacularly successful—over 70,000 volunteers worldwide have counted more than 11 million birds, traced migratory patterns, and discovered new locations for some species. This example of citizen science illustrates one way citizens can do what professionals alone cannot—in this case, visit far-reaching places to make observations guided by professional knowledge.

The Audubon Bird Count shows citizens participating in science as extenders, collecting data far beyond what scientists can do alone. Citizens can also serve as collaborators, working side by side with scientists to help analyze and interpret data. The Foldit portal, for example, engages citizen game players in recognizing patterns and solving puzzles that ultimately crowdsource how proteins fold. And in a very advanced form of citizen science, citizens and scientists co-create knowledge, partnering to pose research questions, set funding priorities, determine analytical approaches, and evaluate evidence.

Open science promises to accelerate knowledge building by complementing (or sometimes disrupting) traditional approaches to discovery with strategies that bring many more perspectives into the research process earlier, and with greater dialogue. With open science, scientists have new roles and gain new resources not available under traditional research models. And when citizens are engaged in the process, society benefits by raising the level of scientific understanding among participants and, by extension, across communities.

For NLM to be more fully involved in open science, our long-standing approaches to research support and scholarly communication must take on new dimensions. What do you think those might be?"