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Short Abstract

Citizen science is already an essential and inescapable step for some science use cases in many large projects. I will briefly outline some European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) use cases for citizen science and some related practical and governance challenges.

Abstract

Major European Union-funded research infrastructure and open science projects have traditionally included dissemination work, for mostly one-way communication of the research activities. I will very briefly discuss our radical re-envisioning of this work in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), by directly engaging citizen science volunteers into the research in several Horizon-funded projects: ASTERICS and ACME (multi-messenger astronomy and astroparticle physics), ESCAPE (open science in astronomy, astroparticle physics and high energy collider physics), and ELSA (ESA Euclid space telescope spectroscopy). I will conclude with some discussion points for the roundtable discussion, including opportunities for deploying crowdsourced data mining in the physical sciences and for obtaining training data for machine learning, while dealing in parallel with challenges in the areas of data aggregation, EOSC authentication/authorisation, and the under-representation of crowdsourced data mining in the advisory structures of EOSC.

My position for the roundtable discussions will be that the primary goal of citizen science must always be to answer a fundamental research question; if public engagement is the primary goal to optimise, then other, more targeted approaches may be more effective.

(I've been invited by Maria Rosa (Rosy) Mondardini to contribute to her roundtable discussion on crowdsourced data mining / citizen science. I hope the abstract above is what you're looking for.)