When exactly is it citizen science? – Armchair Ecology

"I would be curious to see how many articles using citizen science data are published open access. The data are generated by people with a lot of domain expertise, most likely a lot of interest in the outcome of using these data, and so they should be interested in reading the results. Something as trivial as the way we publish can determine whether our citizen scientist colleagues are included, or excluded, from the entire scientific process.

Interestingly, the issue of data sharing rarely comes up in the context of citizen science programs. While ecologists can be fiercely protective of their data, there is very little discussion of the rights of citizen data collectors. A recent paper by Groom and colleagues is  very clear about the need to implement credit mechanisms for citizen scientists. Failing to do so is an (implicit) declaration that data generated by citizen scientists do not deserve the same level of credit than data collected by “real” scientists (even though these data will still be used to publish articles and advance careers).

My main issue with the status of citizen science at the moment is that the interaction only goes one way. Citizens are the largest providers of biodiversity data (at least in Québec, and most likely in Canada), and these data are re-used in a way that (i) is not inclusive of data producers, as it happens within the university context, and (ii) leads to knowledge products that are overwhelmingly not accessible to the public."