In many parts of science, we're not constrained by what data we can get, we're constrained by what we can do with the data we have. Citizen science is a very powerful way of solving that problem.
— Chris Lintott,
Time , July 11, 2011
Between the Elsevier boycott and the Bipartisan Federal Research Public Access Act working its way through Congress, there is plenty of talk about the need for openness in research. However, the results from Zooniverse.org , the suite of citizen science projects that I run with collaborators in the U.K., U.S. and around the world, show that access to data and information is only the beginning of what’s needed.
Take the recent discovery of a likely planet candidate around one of the 150,000 stars monitored by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Volunteers at planethunters.org sorting through public data returned by the spacecraft are able to discover previously unnoticed transits—the wink of a star as a planet passes in front of it. While the data is available for download from the Kepler archive, our interface allows hundreds of thousands of volunteers with no technical expertise to participate in cutting-edge science.
This sort of experience removes the biggest barrier to participation and engagement: the misguided belief that nothing useful can be done by the amateur, that Science with a capital S is best left to Scientists in ivory laboratories. Once that barrier is broken down, volunteers are often motivated to do much more than just click on a website. Within 24 hours of launching GalaxyZoo.org (the original Zooniverse project), the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour. The project received more than 50 million classifications during its first year, from almost 150,000 people. The planet candidate I mentioned above was discovered and even modeled by volunteers long before the science team got to it.
Over at GalaxyZoo, we’ve been following up on the Green Pea galaxies. These enigmatic systems, which owe their name to their small, round and green appearance in images scoured by volunteers and drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey , were identified, catalogued and classified by a group of volunteers. They have turned out to be the most efficient factories of stars in the local universe. They now form the focus of much professional study, the results of which are reported to their eager discoverers via papers placed on the freely accessible arXiv.org repository.
Examples like these abound, but even with access to scientific journals, many of the volunteers who tracked down the Peas would never have considered trawling the literature. Their discovery—made possible by the Galaxy Zoo interface and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey team’s decision to be open not only with their data but will the tools required to make sense of it—gave them the incentive and the motivation to dig much deeper than they would otherwise have done.
This deeper exploration is enabled by a radical openness, marked by a commitment to enabling access to data at a level which is meaningful for the audience. It’s more expensive, more difficult and frankly more hassle than simply campaigning for the removal of payrolls, but it’s just as important. Luckily, sustained effort can bring remarkable rewards—just ask the more than 500,000 registered Zooniverse volunteers.
posted by Chris Lintott, Chair of the Citizen Science Alliance which runs the citizen science projects at zooniverse.org .
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