Community over Commercialization was the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week. The organisers aim for this theme was to encourage a candid conversation about which approaches to openness prioritise the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not.

This is related to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which highlights the need to prioritize community in its calls for the prevention of “inequitable extraction of profit from publicly funded scientific activities” and support for “non-commercial publishing models and collaborative publishing models with no article processing charges.” By focusing on these areas, we can achieve the original vision outlined when open access was first defined: “an old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.”

-adapted from openaccessweek.org

This week, in support of this theme we have launched our Citizen Science community for anyone at UCL that wants to get involved, staff, students, anyone! It’s the culmination of a lot of work from the team in the Office for Open Science and Scholarship and I wanted to close out the week with a discussion of how we have been approaching Citizen Science at UCL and what we are going to be doing next.

One of the core values of the Office for Open Science & Scholarship, and therefore the team behind the Citizen Science community, is to make everything we do as inclusive as possible of as many of the UCL subject areas as we can.

We use Citizen Science as a title, because it is a commonly used and recognised term, but as we want to create a broad community we have worked hard to create a unifying definition that we want to work to, and this is where this word cloud comes in! This is a work in progress where we are trying to collect as many terms for what we would consider to be a part of Citizen Science as possible and we are hoping that the new community will help us to develop this more and make it as comprehensive as possible!

So, what else have we been doing and what are we working on?

As well as the launch of the UCL Citizen Science Academy, over the past year or so, the team has been talking to a number of colleagues that have been working on citizen science projects to get insights into the projects happening at UCL (which we have added to our website), but also the skills and support that people would recommend for new starters. This will all feed into us recommending, commissioning or developing training and support for you, our community. The aim is to keep building up our existing citizen science related community and enable new, interested parties to get involved, supported by both us and the community as a whole.

We are always asking for information about new projects, feedback on how we can make our community more inclusive and looking for new words for our word cloud so please get in touch by email or by commenting below, we love to hear from you!

Guest post by Sheetal Saujani, Citizen Science Coordinator

Have you thought about including members of the public in your research?  Would you like to connect and collaborate with the community around you? Alternatively, would you like to work with project leaders to answer real-world questions and gather data?

Broadly defined, citizen science is research undertaken by members of the public, often in collaboration with academic or research institutions or similar. Citizen science is a diverse practice involving various forms and aims of collaboration between academic and community researchers and a broad range of disciplines.

What are the great things about Citizen Science?

Working together as part of a community with professionals, citizen scientists can play an important part in genuine discovery, experiments, data collection and analysis. Through citizen science, any one of us can take part in extraordinary research!

We can improve our community whilst at the same time helping to provide answers to some of the big questions about the world we live in.  Whether we participate in projects that measure air quality, monitor damage from storms, or track where our rubbish is going, we can help solve problems and influence a better future for our society.

The Office for Open Science and Scholarship advocates a broad approach to citizen science, so whether you call it citizen science, participatory research, community action, co-production, public engagement, or anything else, we’re all working together to strengthen UCL activities in this area!

What do Citizen Science projects look like?

Take a look at some of the exciting citizen science projects at UCL run by various research groups and departments at UCL. Some of these projects have now been completed.

And below are a few newer ones (this list is not exhaustive):

• Take part in the Big Repair Project!
• Read about the 100 Cyclists Project!
• Learn more about Eyes on Eyes!

Also, if you’re interested, there are many platforms and projects happening outside of UCL (below are just a few):

• Thousands of people across the country take part in the Natural History Museum’s crowdsourced science projects.
• On the SciStarter website you can join and contribute to science through thousands of amazing research projects and events.
• With more than one million volunteers, Zooniverse is one of the biggest citizen science platforms in the UK.
• If you’re interested in Biology, Ecology or Earth Science, check out the citizen science projects run by the National Geographic Society.
• The InSPIRES Open Platform is an online collaborative and crowdsourced database featuring many citizen-led participatory research and innovation projects.
• Patientslikeme is an online platform where patients can share and learn from real-time, outcome-based health data and contribute to the scientific conversation surrounding thousands of diseases.
• The Globe at Night project aims to raise awareness about light pollution and its impacts on communities. You can report your night sky brightness observations daily.

What is UCL doing around Citizen Science?

Our Office is working to raise awareness of citizen science approaches and activities, with the aim of building a support service and a community around citizen science.  The plan is to bring together colleagues who’ve run or are currently running citizen science or participatory research projects to share good practices and experiences with each other and support and encourage others to do the same!

If you are interested in citizen science, we would really like to hear from you, so please get in touch with us via email at openscience@ucl.ac.uk and tell us what you need.