New paper: Innovation in Citizen Science – Perspectives on Science-Policy Advances

From time to time, there are opportunities to become a co-author with a lot of people that you are very happy to be associated with – to demonstrate a shared piece of work that represents a common understanding. The participation in the first European Citizen Science Association conference in 2016 created such an opportunity, with a paper that was written by a core group of people from the organising committee and keynote speakers. The paper “Innovation in Citizen Science – Perspectives on Science-Policy Advances” is a report of the issues that were covered in the conference and the lessons and recommendations that emerge from it. The list of authors is impressive: Susanne Hecker , Rick Bonney, Muki Haklay, Franz Hölker, Heribert Hofer, Claudia Goebel, Margaret Gold, Zen Makuch, Marisa Ponti, Anett Richter, Lucy Robinson, Jose Rubio Iglesias, Roger Owen, Taru Peltola, Andrea Sforzi, Jennifer Shirk, Johannes Vogel, Katrin Vohland, Thorsten Witt, and Aletta Bonn.

The writing was led by Susanne Hecker (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research UFZ / German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig) and also led to an innovation in the journal “Citizen Science: Theory and Practice” by creating the space to report meetings. There is a long tradition in science of producing meeting’s reports, and there is an assumption that this is now obsolete in the age of blogs – but this paper provides the demonstration that this is incorrect. First, the paper provides a clearer and well-structured statement of the event and its outcomes. Unlike blogs, it is appearing two years after the event, but this also means that the content needs to stand the test of time and point to the long-term outcomes from the event. Secondly, the longer period of editing and the process of peer review made the paper a better record of the event.

The paper is open access and you can find it here. The abstract is:

Citizen science is growing as a field of research with contributions from diverse disciplines, promoting innovation in science, society, and policy. Inter- and transdisciplinary discussions and critical analyses are needed to use the current momentum to evaluate, demonstrate, and build on the advances that have been made in the past few years. This paper synthesizes results of discussions at the first international citizen science conference of the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) in 2016 in Berlin, Germany, and distills major points of the discourse into key recommendations. To enhance innovation in science, citizen science needs to clearly demonstrate its scientific benefit, branch out across disciplines, and foster active networking and new formats of collaboration, including true co-design with participants. For fostering policy advances, it is important to embrace opportunities for policy-relevant monitoring and policy development and to work with science funders to find adequate avenues and evaluation tools to support citizen science. From a society angle it is crucial to engage with societal actors in various formats that suit participants and to evaluate two-way learning outcomes as well as to develop the transformative role of science communication. We hope that these key perspectives will promote citizen science progress at the science-society-policy interface.