---
title: "Citizen science"
chunk: 5/19
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:48:48.750305+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Data governance, privacy and sovereignty ===
As citizen science becomes increasingly influenced by digital platforms and sensors, governance questions go beyond research ethics to include data protection law and community control over reuse. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), participatory projects that involve personal data can complicate the usual separation between professional researchers ("controllers") and participants ("data subjects"): citizen scientists may be considered joint controllers when they share or shape project purposes, which could expose volunteers to compliance responsibilities and create risks for both participant protections and project legitimacy. Practical guidance for citizen science therefore increasingly requires early planning for lawful data handling, clear allocation of responsibilities, and transparency about data flows across collection, storage, and sharing.
A second governance challenge concerns power asymmetries in open data. Because volunteers often produce data while institutions handle and publish it, decisions about openness, attribution, and access restrictions can include unequal priorities and certain vulnerabilities. Ethical open-data practice in citizen science is therefore frequently framed as a matter of data governance, not only technical quality. These concerns also extend to environmental monitoring where data may be politically sensitive (e.g., pollution exposure, land use, biodiversity decline).
Finally, monitoring initiatives have highlighted data sovereignty: the principle that indigenous peoples and local communities should govern collection, ownership, access and use of data connected to territories and cultural knowledge; so that digital monitoring does not reproduce colonialist tendencies between knowledge holders and external institutions. Related international policy discussions on open science explicitly point out that openness should not overrule privacy, equity, or indigenous rights over traditional knowledge.

== Economic worth ==
In the research paper "Can citizen science enhance public understanding of science?" by Bonney et al. 2016, statistics which analyse the economic worth of citizen science are used, drawn from two papers: i) Sauermann and Franzoni 2015, and
ii) Theobald et al. 2015. In "Crowd science user contribution patterns and their implications" by Sauermann and Franzoni (2015), seven projects from the Zooniverse web portal are used to estimate the monetary value of the citizen science that had taken place. The seven projects are: Solar Stormwatch, Galaxy Zoo Supernovae, Galaxy Zoo Hubble, Moon Zoo, Old Weather, The Milky Way Project and Planet Hunters. Using data from 180 days in 2010, they find a total of 100,386 users participated, contributing 129,540 hours of unpaid work. Estimating at a rate of $12 an hour (an undergraduate research assistant's basic wage), the total contributions amount to $1,554,474, an average of $222,068 per project. The range over the seven projects was from $22,717 to $654,130.
In "Global change and local solutions: Tapping the unrealized potential of citizen science for biodiversity research" by Theobald et al. 2015, the authors surveyed 388 unique biodiversity-based projects. Quoting: "We estimate that between 1.36 million and 2.28 million people volunteer annually in the 388 projects we surveyed, though variation is great" and that "the range of in-kind contribution of the volunteerism in our 388 citizen science projects as between $667 million to $2.5 billion annually."
Worldwide participation in citizen science continues to grow. A list of the top five citizen science communities compiled by Marc Kuchner and Kristen Erickson in July 2018 shows a total of 3.75 million participants, although there is likely substantial overlap between the communities.