USGS’s Did You Feel It? initiative is a great example of one kind of citizen science—everyday people using their experiences or interests to participate in scientific projects. These research projects come from a startling variety of scientific disciplines. Bird lovers can participate in the Audobon Society’s annual Christmas bird count. History enthusiasts can scrutinize 19th-century whaling logbooks to better understand climate change. You could also use a virtual microscope to hunt for particles of interstellar dust retrieved by the Stardust spacecraft in 2006. If neuroscience is more your thing, you can help to map the brain by playing EyeWire, an online game designed by a lab at Princeton University.
Citizen contributions to projects like these go back at least as far as Thomas Jefferson’s plan to collect weather data from as many people as possible in order to produce “a reliable theory of weather and climate.” It’s the kind of citizen science that most everyone agrees is worthwhile—helpful to researchers and edifying for the public. In fact, a bipartisan bill making its way through Congress at the moment, the Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2015, encourages collaboration between scientists and the public. The bill appeals to a range of political sensibilities because it encourages public engagement in science and broadens the scope of federally funded research without increasing budgets. (Citizen volunteers cost even less than postdocs, it turns out.) [...]
This gets to an important final point about public involvement in science policy: Citizen participation improves the science. Ominous clouds have been building above many parts of the scientific establishment, aided by a steady updraft of retractions, fraudulent practices, reproducibility problems, conflicts of interest, conflicting results, and simple irrelevance. One of the reasons for this is that scientists are rarely accountable to anything outside their community. A citizenry that demands tangible results—such as effective cancer therapies and safe drinking water—can help to discipline research efforts toward finding solutions to pressing, real-world problems.
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