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Citizen science projects recruit members of the public as volunteers to process and produce datasets. These datasets must win the trust of the scientific community. The task of securing credibility involves, in part, applying standard…
Citizen science, in which volunteers work with professional scientists to conduct research, is expanding due to large online datasets. To plan projects, it is important to understand volunteers' motivations for participating. This paper…
We investigate the development of scientific content knowledge of volunteers participating in online citizen science projects in the Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org), including the astronomy projects Galaxy Zoo (www.galaxyzoo.org) and Planet…
The Galaxy Zoo citizen science website invites anyone with an Internet connection to participate in research by classifying galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. As of April 2009, more than 200,000 volunteers had made more than 100…
The recent emergence of online citizen science is illustrative of an efficient and effective means to harness the crowd in order to achieve a range of scientific discoveries. Fundamentally, citizen science projects draw upon crowds of…
We review the relatively new, internet-enabled, and rapidly-evolving field of citizen science, focusing on research projects in stellar, extragalactic and solar system astronomy that have benefited from the participation of members of the…
Online Citizen Science platforms are good examples of socio-technical systems where technology-enabled interactions occur between scientists and the general public (volunteers). Citizen Science platforms usually host multiple Citizen…
Citizen science projects engage people in activities that are part of a scientific research effort. On multi-project citizen science platforms, scientists can create projects consisting of tasks. Volunteers, in turn, participate in…
Citizen science often requires volunteers to perform low-skill tasks such as counting and documenting en- vironmental features. In this work, we contend that these tasks do not adequately meet the needs of citizen scientists motivated by…
The knowledge commons research framework is applied to a case of commons governance grounded in research in modern astronomy. The case, Galaxy Zoo, is a leading example of at least three different contemporary phenomena. In the first place…
Human computation is a computing approach that draws upon human cognitive abilities to solve computational tasks for which there are so far no satisfactory fully automated solutions even when using the most advanced computing technologies…
The increasing importance of digital sky surveys collecting many millions of galaxy images has reinforced the need for robust methods that can perform morphological analysis of large galaxy image databases. Citizen science initiatives such…
In recent years, citizen science has grown in popularity due to a number of reasons, including the emphasis on informal learning and creativity potential associated with these initiatives. Citizen science projects address research questions…
Over the past decade, Citizen Science has become a proven method of distributed data analysis, enabling research teams from diverse domains to solve problems involving large quantities of data with complexity levels which require human…
We provide a brief overview of the Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse projects, including a short discussion of the history of, and motivation for, these projects as well as reviewing the science these innovative internet-based citizen science…
The contributions of everyday individuals to significant research has grown dramatically beyond the early days of classical birdwatching and endeavors of amateurs of the 19th century. Now people who are casually interested in science can…
Online learners spend millions of hours per year testing their new skills on assignments with known answers. This paper explores whether framing research questions as assignments with unknown answers helps learners generate novel, useful,…
Throughout history, everyday people have contributed to science through a myriad of volunteer activities. This early participation required training and often involved mentorship from scientists or senior citizen scientists (or, as they…
Multi-component modelling of galaxies is a valuable tool in the effort to quantitatively understand galaxy evolution, yet the use of the technique is plagued by issues of convergence, model selection and parameter degeneracies. These issues…
Citizen science changes the way scientific research is pursued. It opens up data collection and analysis to the general public, to the wisdom of crowds. In this emerging area, there is much research to be done to better understand how we…