Let's Write About Science

Frans Folkvord

Although citizens have been participating in scientific research for many centuries, mostly in social and medical sciences, where they were the ones under investigation, different forms of citizens science have become increasingly popular and important during the last few decades. More specific, citizens have donated the processing powers of their personal computers and laptops to perform scientific calculations (SETI@home); amateur naturalists worldwide collecting observational data outdoors about birds and their behaviour (eBird); city residents mapping air pollution with smart devices (City Sense); people classifying online images of galaxies from home to save time and energy of researchers (Galaxy Zoo); patients sharing quantified observations, symptoms, and experiences about their health to inform doctors and healthcare providers (e.g.,COVID-19 apps); and biohackers attempting to produce insulin in a community laboratory (Counter Culture Labs).

Citizens science is considered to be the future of genuine interactive and inclusive science engagement (Cohn 2008; Cooper et al. 2012), whereby public-participation engagement and science communication go hand in hand, thereby actively popularizing science among participants and democratizing the topics of scientific research in order to improve scientific research and its structural impact. Most scholars are still somewhat distrustful towards “citizen science”, having the feeling that including citizens in scientific research devaluates their intense and extensive educational training, which in some cases is also correct, but the rise to prominence of the term in contemporary scientific research is beyond doubt and hugely interesting historically, politically, culturally, and epistemologically (Strasser et al., 2019). It may even point to a potential transformation in the modes of public participation in science to increase the identification of the general public with scientific research, considering also the widespread belief among funding institutions that involving the public in the research is increasingly relevant for funding and the need to show the expected impact of the proposed project among the wider public – also to better inform society about all elements of scientific research.

In particular, one important element of science is that science is based on uncertainty. It has been overlooked by the general public and is maybe not very well communicated by scientists themselves, but is one of the cornerstones of science itself. Especially in this period of crisis that has no precedent, and assumptions and predictions are established on limited knowledge and understanding of the virus and its consequences, also by the experts. Unless this uncertainty is communicated effectively, and well understood by society, decision makers and citizens may put too much or too little faith in scientific research, which as a result leads to great misunderstandings, and in some countries even to riots because experts support lockdowns while citizens do not understand why and listen to contradicting information, some without any support but still convincing enough. For example, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States of America, and the most important advisor to the national government in this matter, blames the problem on the “anti-scientific attitude” of the Americans to follow the guidelines that have been provided. “There is an anti-science, anti-authority and anti-vaccination feeling in some people,” Fauci said in an interview with CNN (2020). “An alarmingly large number, proportionately.” Taking full advantage of scientific research requires knowing and understanding how much uncertainty surrounds science and scientific research. Science can only be fully effective and impactful if people understand its methodologies and functionalities.

The disadvantage of uncertainty that is part of science offers room for the spread of misinformation and disinformation, which is false or misleading information that is spread deliberately to deceive the recipients. Because science never can give a final answer to questions, especially not to complex questions such as how to perfectly handle pandemics, it leaves room for people to communicate false information. Especially during the current COVID-19, misinformation and disinformation in the health space have been thriving (European Commission 2020). It is therefore extremely important to educate and include people actively in scientific research, also during important and stressful situations such as the current pandemic, to improve our decision-making in difficult situations, create better science, enhance public support for science, and make the impact of scientific solutions greater and more efficient than ever before.

Citizens science appears to be a win-win scenario, attracting scientists into public engagement work and at the same time get the public to participate directly in the process of science and thus learn more about the processes of scientific enquiry and the difficulties this brings (Bauer/Jensen 2011). Public engagement is an integral part of the systematic research being conducted, thereby educating implicitly the participants about scientific research, raising awareness about everything that scientific research brings, and increasing enthusiasm around the scientific research topics and methodology.

In this chapter I will describe how citizens science can enhance the confidence, trust, understanding, and popularization of science, also taking into account the disadvantages of including citizens in scientific research. First, I will discuss the five different forms of citizens science, as has been differentiated by Strasser et al. (2019). Second, I will elaborate on how scientists can benefit from the participation of citizens in their scientific research, also discussing the drawbacks of involving citizens in scientific research. Third, I will outline the positive effects of participation of citizens in scientific research among themselves, whereby I also will focus on the difficulties this brings. Finally, I will conclude and provide some suggestions on how future research projects could effectively make use of citizens science for the popularization of science.

Five Types of Citizens Science

Considering that citizens have been participating actively in scientific research for centuries, many different forms of citizens science exist that all can contribute to improve scientific research. Strasser et al. (2019) differentiated between five different types of practices whereby citizens are actively involved in scientific research, namely sensing, computing, analysing, self-reporting, and making.

Second, computing, or volunteer computing, is a much less familiar form of citizens science. In general it means that citizens donate the power of their desktop computers’ or laptops in order to conduct analyses of big data files. One of the first projects that conducted this form of citizens science was the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project, trying to analyse radio signals that might have indicated the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Considering its great success, this project led to the BOINC (Berkely Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), an online platform whereby participants can choose between many different science-related projects to share their computing space, which many participants keep doing in the fields of astronomy, chemistry, physics, biology and medicine, mathematics and computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and earth sciences.

Third, citizens can also support scientists in conducting specific analyses that are needed because of the volume of the data. For example, in 2006 a NASA spacecraft landed back on earth after spending almost seven years in space and collecting millions of specks of dust, hoping that one of them might be of interstellar origin and providing insights on life on other planets. In order to be able to analyse them as soon as possible, they launched the online platform Stardust@home, making it possible for participants to use a virtual microscope to identify these rare particles from online images (Mendez 2008) and see if some of them contained interstellar origin. Subsequently, different projects have started using citizens to analyse data, for example, one project determining the shape of galaxies (e.g., Galaxy Zool; Raddick et al. 2019), counting penguins in large colonies (Penguin Watch; Jones et al. 2018), or playing games folding proteins in three dimensions (e.g., Foldit project; Good/Su 2011).

Fifth, citizens can also be actively involved in the making of things and producing knowledge in laboratories and outside. For example, in a recent project I am currently conducting to promote fruits and vegetables to children (Folkvord 2019), vlogs will be developed for a large multi-centred randomized controlled trial in co-creation with different groups (e.g., children, parents, vloggers, fruit and vegetable producers). The primary outcomes from these focus groups will be used to develop the exact intervention that will be implemented in a number of schools in the Netherlands to test the effectiveness of the promotion techniques. The basic idea is that end users have a much better idea and understanding of the practical drivers and barriers of a certain topic, and including them in the co-creation enhances the probability that it will be an effective methodology.

These five different forms of science communication have been widely used by a large variety in different projects, all learning from each other’s experiences and their successes and failures. Including citizens in scientific research has many benefits for both scientists and citizens, but also some limitations and drawbacks, which I will discuss now.

Science with Citizens