CS Track News Team

The co-evaluation approach was introduced and applied by the CoAct project in collaboration with the local research teams across three initiatives that address global social concerns (youth employment, mental healthcare, and environmental justice). Based on these...

We congratulate our colleague Dr. Nicolás Felipe Gutiérrez Páez who defended his thesis "Motivations, engagement, and incentives in online communities: contributions to theory, data analytics and design" on 22 June 2022 and was awarded Cum Laude.

On May 2, 2022 our team members Michael Strähle and Christine Urban (Wissenschaftsladen Wien – Science Shop Vienna) chaired the session Inclusion and Exclusion in Citizen Science and presented a paper on this topic at STS Graz 2022. The session included presentations...

On May 5, 2022 our team members Michael Strähle and Christine Urban (Wissenschaftsladen Wien – Science Shop Vienna) gave an invited presentation at the University of Vienna's Department of Science and Technology Studies. The presentation was part of an event on...

Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) hosted a busy project meeting over the last 3 days in the lovely Poblenou Campus in Barcelona. This meeting comes at a critical time in the life of the project when much of the planned triangulation work comes to the fore and the various...

On 12 and 13 October 2021, the SensJus project convened a workshop on Health-Citizen Science Dilemmas under the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR), at the Brocher Foundation, Geneva. The workshop explored the scarcely...

The Field Guide to Citizen Science, from the expert team at SciStarter, provides everything newcomers need to get involved with citizen science. Readers will learn what citizen science is, how to succeed and stay motivated when participating in a project, and how the...

A new international project AURORA (“Achieving a new European Energy Awareness”) has been launched to empower the people of Europe to take ownership of the climate change debate. The project fosters an explicitly citizen-led, bottom-up approach compared to the more...

The UNESCO recommendation on Open Science has been unanimously adopted in its entirety by Member States during the Science Commission plenary in November 2021 which is a milestone for Open Science and Citizen Science practitioners. During the General Conference...

Citizen Science: Theory and Practice journal has just released a new special collection on citizen science in Higher Education. This special collection explores the ways both online and field-based citizen science can be integrated in higher education as a tool for...

The EU Commission has recently published a new report entitled "Enabling open science and societal engagement in research". This report presents insights and recommendations from a workshop held on 1 July 2021 attended by beneficiaries of the Science with and for...

Our colleagues David Roldán-álvarez, Fernando Martínez-Martínez, Estefanía Martín from URJC have recently published an article "Understanding Discussions of Citizen Science Around Sustainable Development Goals in Twitter" in the IEEE Xplore journal. This paper...

One of the central characteristics of the CS Track approach to investigating citizen science projects and activities is to focus on underlying types of participation, collaboration and knowledge creation. This perspective comprises semantic and pragmatic aspects of...

On Tuesday 16 November the CS Track team ran a workshop about a web-based tool called the analytics workbench that can be used to collect information about citizen science projects. This tool was developed by project partner RIAS. 22 participants from 10 different...

The community of Citizen Science practitioners in Zurich, including researchers at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, and citizens have just published their Citizen Science Handbook. It is a practical guide on how to successfully design and run co-created...

EUHubs4Data is a EU-funded project that will build a European federation of Data Innovation Hubs and connect them with data incubators and platforms, SME networks, AI communities, skills and training organisations and open data repositories. Project partners are...

Citizen science has a foundation in traditional fields of science such as biology that remain strong today. However, based on the initial results of an international survey that began early 2021 by the CS Track team, it was discovered that 20% of citizen science...

Although citizen science projects take on a variety of forms and scales, the motivation of those behind the scenes are similar. In fact, the CS Track team has learned from an ongoing survey that began this year that the interest in a particular theme or topic, being...

The most recent set of policy briefs from NEWSERA published on 28 September 2021 identify the challenges that citizen science initiatives may face when reaching out to different communities, and pinpoint innovative ideas to overcome difficulties...

Citizen Science: Stories of Science We Can All Do Together. is a podcast from SciStarter. This show spotlights the many different ways that individuals and communities are exploring and changing the world around them through public participation in science. Episodes...

The Engaging Citizen Science Conference will promote knowledge sharing among the citizen science community. The aim of the conference is to engage citizen science researchers, practitioners, and citizens in sharing research, ideas, and innovations in order to make the...

Technology undoubtedly continues to play an important role in our daily lives. The CS Track survey that was launched at the beginning of 2021 has also underscored that the same can be said for those who participate in citizen science projects as 96% of survey...

The activities in citizen science tend to involve a variety of people representing different walks of life - some at the professional level, some at the enthusiast level. Based on the initial results of a survey conducted by the CS Track team earlier this year, it was...

We are delighted to announce that the conference paper entitled "Using Network Analysis to Characterize Participation and Interaction in a Citizen Science Online Community", written by our project partners Ishari Amarasinghe, Sven Manske,...

Open Research Europe has recently published a case study that describes 'Generation Solar', which is an open database of small-scale solar photovoltaic installations. The web version of the app can already be accessed via this link and it can also be freely downloaded...

The workshop Onboarding Citizen Science and the role of research libraries: barriers and accelerators took place on 23 June 2021 during the LIBER 2021 Annual Conference. The participants of this interactive event discussed and shared their...

The YOUCOUNT project team aims to develop ‘actionable’ knowledge of the positive drivers for social inclusion of disadvantaged young people. They are planning to invite citizen scientists to take part in case studies in 9 European countries and therefore it was...

The University of Dundee is offering a course entitled "Citizen Science Projects: How to Make a Difference?" on the Futurelearn platform. In this course, you’ll discover many different types of projects and how to get involved. You’ll find out how to lead a project,...

The INCENTIVE project aims to demonstrate the potential of citizen science through the co-creation, establishment and assessment of Citizen Science Hubs in four EU Universities: University of Twente (NL), Autonomous University of Barcelona (ES), Aristotle University...

This report presents the outcomes of the 2020-2021 EUA Open Science Survey and provides evidence-based recommendations for institutions, researchers, research funders and policymakers on the transition towards Open Science. The 2020-2021 EUA Open Science Survey...

The Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) in the UK has published a new report entitled "Future Directions for Citizen Science & Public Policy" in June, 2021. Over the past year CSaP has brought together policymakers and academics to discuss citizen science —...

A technical report was recently published by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, on Citizen Science Strategies and Initiatives in Europe. This report provides a synthetic summary of the findings stemming from three...

Organised jointly by BRITEC with Scientix, AmgenTeach, CS Track and the STEM Alliance, the 2021 STEM High Level Event “Bringing Research Into the Classroom” offered two days, 20 and 21 May, of online presentations and interactive sessions with researchers and...

Two days, six sessions with short presentations, nine working groups, ten workshops, thirty posters, and much more - the annual conference “Forum Citizen Science” in the beginning of May 2021 in a nutshell. For the first time, the conference was held digitally and -...

Organised jointly by BRITEC with Scientix, AmgenTeach, CS Track and the STEM Alliance, the 2021 STEM High Level Event “Bringing Research Into the Classroom” will offer two days, 20 and 21 May, of online conferences and interactive sessions with researchers and...

This third CS Track workshops at this year’s CitSci Virtual conference will focus on the approach and methods/tools used to communicate results. During this intro session, the team from URJC will present how they have set up the communications channels for the...

The second of three CS Track workshops at this year’s CitSci Virtual conference will focus on the approach and methods/tools used to analyse data. During this session, the team from RIAS will introduce the analytics work being carried out by the project team and the...

This first of three CS Track workshops at this year’s CitSci Virtual conference will be focused on the development of a database of CS projects and preliminary data analysis. During this event we will explain how the database was built, talk about the tools and...

A new research paper entitled “When It Rains, It Pours: Integrating Citizen Science Methods to Understand Resilience of Urban Green Spaces” was recently published. Researchers used citizen science methods to assess flood mitigation potential of urban green spaces in...

Michiel Van Oudheusden and Yasuhito Abe have recently published a research paper on the two trajectories of “Citizen Sciencization” in Environmental Governance. They conducted a comparative analysis of Safecast (radiation pollution; Japan) and CuriousNoses (air...

The CitieS-Health Toolkit provides a customised and interactive collection of adaptable instruments to empower anybody to engage communities to solve issues of common concerns and deploy actions for making your world a better place to live in. The tools are meant to...

CS Track partner URJC presented a virtual poster and a video presentation entitled “A case study on communication to boost Citizen Science social education: CS Track Community Platform” during the International New Perspectives in Science Education Conference on 18...

This new call from EU-Citizen.Science provides funding for the development, implementation and testing of 10 training modules on the topic of citizen science. These modules will be uploaded to the Moodle integration of the EU-Citizen.Science platform. The training...

The new BRITEC MOOC “A roadmap to citizen science Education” will provide materials and stories of implementation from innovative citizen science education projects. According to the organisers, Citizen Science Education is based on the assumption that teachers and...

A new chapter by Lisa M. Rasmussen on Research Ethics in Citizen Science has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Research. This chapter outlines some of the main ethical issues in citizen science research, which the author describes as a new research approach...

The aim of this report produced by the RETHINK Project is to explore how European citizens make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to do so, the project team conducted 81 in-depth interviews with citizens, during the first wave of the pandemic. You can access...

The eagerly awaited publication "The Science of Citizen Science" is now available as as open access publication from Springer. Over 100 authors contributed to this book, including Julia Lorke and Yaela Golumbic from the CS Track project team. "This book is a wonderful...

The Citizen Social Science & Complex Systems Science Workshop is a Satellite Workshop within the Conference on Complex Systems 2020 that the Complex Systems Society organises every year. This year the workshop took place online on 9 December. The URJC team led by...

This report entitled Scaling up Citizen Science. What are the factors associated with increased reach and how to lever them to achieve impact is based on a theoretically grounded framework which aims to unbundle the meaning of scaling and spreading in Citizen...

CS Track partner URJC led a virtual session on 5 November as part of the XX edition of the Madrid Science and Innovation Week. The idea behind this session was to foster a better understanding of citizen science and what participation in citizen science projects...

The ACTION project is hosting an online event dedicated to CS financial sustainability on 19 November from 10:00 to 12:00 CET. This webinar includes talks with experts and success cases and provides an opportunity to discuss different sustainability options. The event...

The Citizen Science: Theory and Practice journal is planning to publish a special collection on Citizen Science in Higher Education. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal providing a central space for cross-disciplinary...

CS Track partner UPF are leading on the work to create a comprehensive database of projects that will help the team explore citizen science activities. To date this data collection includes data on over 12,000 projects and continues to expand. On 2/11, Patricia Santos...

81 presentations, 50 e-posters, 18 sessions, 5 plenary talks, 2 panel discussions, 1 evening event - that's what made up the Knowledge for Change: A decade of Citizen Science (2020-2030) Conference in support of the SDGs conference in Berlin this week. All this along...

This report entitled Community Citizen Science - from promise to action by Rand used findings from disaster response and recovery case studies to identify specific considerations for community citizen science implementation and impacts. Based on 4 key research...

One of the highlights of the ECSA Conference this week was the launch of a bunch of new features in EU-Citizen.Science platform which were launched during an online lunch meeting on Wednesday 9 September. The purpose of these new features is to foster collaboration...

The technical specifications for the CS Track Community Platform were recently finalised in Deliverable 5.1 Technical Specification of the Community Platform. The work was carried out by a team of CS Track researchers led by Manuel Gértrudix from URJC. This...

The CS Track team at JYU are presenting their work in CS Track during a workshop about citizen science on 14 September linked to forest bioeconomy in Northern Karelia, an area in Eastern Finland. During their presentation, they will describe what Citizen Science can...

According to a study carried out recently by the Pew Research Center in the US, one out of 10 adults say they have taken part in an activity classified as citizen science in the past year, and a whopping 26% say that they have taken part in at least one such activity...

A team of CS Track researchers led by Ulrich Hoppe from RIAS have finalised one of the first public deliverables of the project, the Specification of Web-based Analytics Methods and Tools (D3.1). In this deliverable, they describe the CS Track approach in terms of the...

Michael Strähle & Christine Urban / Wissenschaftsladen Wien - Science Shop Vienna are giving a presentation related to their work in CS Track at the 2020 edition of the EASST/4S conference. The title of this fully online conference is "Locating and Timing Matters:...

The recently published report Citizen Science and Citizen Engagement - Achievements in Horizon 2020 and recommendations on the way forward provides an excellent snapshot of European Commission funded efforts in the area of Citizen Science. Written by Colombe Warin and...

The REINFORCE project (Research Infrastructures FOR Citizens in Europe), supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 SWAFS programme, has launched its new fully-developed website. This platform offers a user-friendly browsing experience for the project’s target...

The recording and other materials generated by the recent webinar initiated by members of the ECSA working group on “Learning and Education in Citizen Science” and the Citizen Science COST Action are now available here. Facilitated by the EU-Citizen.Science project,...

Dr. Yaela Golumbic has published initial results of the study that she is leading into citizen science in Australia. Her first results shows ecology to be the clear leader in terms of the scientific areas addressed. This research highlights the unique characteristics...

The ultimate goal of the WeObserve Challenge is to find new approaches and solutions to respond to environmental challenges through open citizen-science datasets, as well as to produce applications and services and showcase citizen science data for public benefit. The...

At certain moments during our two and a half day CS Track partner meeting held online from 4-6 May, we were 25 people from all over Europe discussing the progress of the project --- and it was hard work! but we made it and managed to cover an in-depth programme of...

ECSA and EU.citizen-science have launched the “ECSA Characteristics of Citizen Science” – a foundation document to define the parameters of activities that can be called Citizen Science. This document aimed at providing some set criteria for citizen science, whose...

A recently published paper on Science Direct discusses how citizen science can help addressing Sustainability Transitions (STs). The authors propose three pathways through which citizen science could support STs, based on the premise that any transition is...

Between April 24 and 26, the European Commission hosted a pan-European hackathon to collectively address 20 imminent coronavirus challenges. The objective was to connect civil society, innovatiors, partners and investors across Europe to develop innovative solutions...

The web-version of the citizen science Generation Solar app has just been launched. The GRECO project has developed this tool to research innovative photovoltaic solutions using open science and citizen science. We invite everyone to explore Generation Solar to be...

On April 2, PLOS ONE moderated a Twitter chat on citizen science (CS) methodologies. The dialogue brought together CS practitioners and stakeholders to cover questions on the standardisation of CS projects, the quality of data submitted by citizen scientists,...

In a paper published in PLOS ONE, professionals in the field of agroecology stress that bee monitoring projects have growing popularity throughout the world, especially among citizen scientists. Although the authors of the paper acknowledge citizen science data as...

The new EU-Citizen.Science digital platform for anyone interested in citizen science has just been launched. It gathers best practice resources from the community for initiating, planning and executing citizen science projects, and showcases a wide range of citizen...

Researchers from the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington are calling on citizen scientists to play Foldit – a free online game where players can design and identify proteins that might neutralize SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Read this recent...

In a recent blog post, the Odour Observatory challenges the impact measurement of citizen science approaches. In this post, the authors argue that while independent reports advocate for the many benefits of citizen-lead approaches, there is a need to reassess the data...

The final interview in the EU-Citizen.Science series about inclusion is with Shara Fisler from the Ocean Discovery Institute in the US. In this interview, Shara explains the approach her institute takes in engaging diverse community groups and presents the model that...

As part of our collaboration with other European Citizen Science projects, we were delighted to be included in the most recent newsletter distributed by the EU-Citizen.Science project team. These newsletters are circulated every 4 months and provide projects with an...

EU-Citizen.Science and the European Citizen Science Association are trying to develop a short briefing that can be used by research funders, policy bodies, and scientists, to decide which activities, and under which conditions, should be considered to be citizen...

Our project coordinators Raul Drachman and Reuma De Groot were delighted to take part in the Citizen Science Cluster Workshop which took place on 12 December in Brussels. Along with representatives from 16 other citizen science projects, they discussed how citizen...

The CS Track team finally got the chance to meet one another face-to-face to work on project planning in Leuven on 9-10 December 2019. This meeting was hosted by partner ATiT in Martin’s Klooster in Leuven and turned out to be quite an intensive meeting. It included...