ICT Services for open and citizen science

Abstract

Ideas of open access, open data and open science are transforming the world of scientific inquiry as we speak. Every day thousands of ordinary citizens are engaging in data collection and data processing, giving rise to the new field of citizen science. Never before has the technology enabled scientists to reach out to such vast numbers of collaborators and show their work to the public. From pattern recognition in Hubble space telescope images of distant galaxies to field observations of migration patterns of birds in the rural areas of United States, the possibilities are countless. Certainly this new trend poses important problems and challenges, but it is also obvious that wide acceptance of citizen science can lead not only to great scientific results, but to the popularization of scientific method among the public. In the paper we examine the current state of citizen science, we outline some of the most interesting and difficult challenges in leading scientific projects on such scale, and we present typologies of citizen science projects. We also provide a survey of ICT tools available for citizen science projects.