How Empowering Is Citizen Science? Access, Credits, and Governance for the Crowd

Abstract

Web-based crowdsourced citizen science is an efficient method for scientists to collect and process data. Although lay persons obtain the opportunities to participate in research and engage with scientists, these crowdsourced projects generally maintain the traditional hierarchy of academic science. Lay persons have little say in project or platform governance, and institutional tools to hold project investigators accountable are almost nonexistent. This article examines how existing institutional policies address the question of distribution in crowdsourced citizen science, as it may further affect lay participants’ role in the institution of scientific knowledge production and their access to research resources. This article begins by comparing the norms developed by citizen-science institutions. It then discusses examples from Galaxy Zoo to see how the results of research projects are distributed, both in the form of access to research outcome and in authorship. The article also discusses the potential conflicts that arise when crowdsourced projects are organized by for-profit companies and why citizen-science platforms should develop institutional norms to avoid such conflicts.

Abstract

摘要:透過網站平台以眾包方式進行公民科學,可以讓科學家有效率的蒐集、處理研究資料,雖然素人得到參與研究、與科學家互動的機會,但這一類型的公民科學往往維持了科學研究的階層制度,參與者對研究計劃或是平台治理往往無法置喙,而能要求研究主持者對參與者負責的制度工具也付之闕如。本文探討公民科學如何處理研究成果之資源分配的問題,這些分配的方式將進一步影響素人參與者在科學知識生產制度中的地位以及取得研究資源的機會。本文首先比較公民科學相關機構所發展出的制度規範,再以星系動物園 (Galaxy Zoo) 的幾項研究為例討論研究成果如何分配,包含誰能取得使用研究成果(如論文及研究資料)、以及誰能成為論文的共同作者。本文也檢討營利事業以眾包方式進行公民科學所可能產生的衝突,以及為何公民科學平台應發展相關的制度性規範來避免此等衝突的發生。

• citizen science
• crowdsource
• peer production
• Galaxy Zoo
• distribution
• open access
• scientific authorship
• republic of science
• democratization of science
• collaborative project governance
• collaborative platform governance

• 關鍵字: 公民科學
• 眾包
• 同儕生產
• 星系動物園
• 資源分配
• 開放近用
• 學術論文作者
• 科學共和國
• 科學民主化
• 協作計畫之治理
• 協作平台之治理

Acknowledgments

The initial version of this article was presented at the conference Empowering or Disciplining the Citizenry through Citizen Science: Historical and Normative Perspectives on Knowledge and Power in 2016. I express my gratitude for Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica for supporting the research and the conference; Wen-Tsong Chiou, Chuan-Feng Wu, Kuang-Chi Hung, Anne S. Y. Cheung for co-organizing; and Ellie Yu-Hui Huang for providing research assistance. I also thank Tilman Bayer, Mario Biagioli, Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Hsiang-Fu Huang, Ming-Li Wang, peer reviewers, and the journal editors for their thoughtful suggestions and comments.

Notes

¹ Within Galaxy Zoo’s first year, 150,000 people made 50 million classifications. Considering the estimate that a graduate student working full-time makes 50,000 classifications per month, it would take the student about 1,000 months to complete the same amount of work. The scale and the quality of volunteer contributions are both crucial to the project’s success. As their images receive multiple categorizations, GZ scientists are able to discount the few questionable categorizations through statistical methods (Galaxy Zoo, a).

² The backgrounds of citizen science participants vary. There could be well-trained individuals among the participants, though they may be contributing to a different field from their profession or not contributing in their institutional capacity.

³ One additional policy asks projects to acknowledge Zooniverse in any publication and to report publications back to Zooniverse.

⁴ Margaret Kosmala (2016), a scientist who runs web-based citizen science projects, regards “crowdsourced science” as projects that pay people for their contribution, as in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Lintott’s use of crowdsourcing is broader and should include unpaid volunteers.

⁵ The Budapest Open Access Initiative aims to make all research articles freely available on the Internet.

⁶ Oxford University Press might have been friendlier to GZ and easier to negotiate as GZ was born and is still housed at Oxford University. GZ still relies on the preprint open-access model when it publishes with other journals.

⁷ Zooniverse suggests that the normal proprietary period is two years after project launch but does not impose an upper limit (Zooniverse, b).

⁸ However, when a paper has an extended list of coauthors, such symbolic recognition may weigh too little to be transferred to more tangible assets (Woolston 2015).

⁹ These coauthors’ affiliations include consulting firms and web design companies.

¹⁰ “In recognition of the critical importance of the Stardust@home volunteers, the discoverer of an interstellar dust particle appears as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home team announcing the discovery of the particle” (Stardust@home).

¹¹ Along this line of thinking, if journal editors and publishers are concerned about how to effectively hold coauthors accountable, they are likely to welcome the earlier-mentioned integration of information technology in institutions hosting citizen-science projects that offer technologists new career paths within academic science instead of remaining as outsiders.

¹² Although the authority vested in an institution to confirm discovery is itself an important question of power allocation and symbolic capital in science, this topic is beyond the scope of this article.

¹³ The crowdfunding campaign began on 30 May 2013, and is also known as the “space-selfie” crowdfunding project. With twenty-five dollars, a backer could send media to the spacecraft and have a selfie made with Earth in the background (Lakdawalla 2013).

¹⁴ This last stretch goal ($1.7 million) was added right before the closing of the campaign, asking for $450,000 in forty hours (Kemsley 2013). The campaign closed at $1.5 million.

¹⁵ In October 2018, Planetary Resources was acquired by ConsenSys, a blockchain firm (Planetary Resources 2018).

¹⁶ However, there could still be other ethical problems, for example, if the results are used to manufacture weapons.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shun-Ling Chen

Shun-Ling Chen is an assistant research professor at Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica. She holds a doctorate of juridical science from Harvard Law School and has completed a secondary field of science, technology, and society. Her research interests include online privacy and digital copyright. In particular, she studies how the concepts of authorship and copyright change with new developments in technology, as well as how online communities formulate their social norms regarding access, credits, and governance.