Workshop: Ethical Issues in Citizen Science Research

University Of North Carolina At Charlotte, Charlotte NC

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This award supports a workshop that is designed to bring together citizen science participants and practitioners with scholars in research ethics and related areas of research in the field of Science, Technology, and Society to identify, describe, and address areas of ethical concern in citizen science. Funds will be used for transportation, lodging, food, and conference organization. Products from the workshop will include summaries of sessions made available to the public and online, open-access scholarly publications in "Citizen Science: Theory and Practice," the new journal of the Citizen Science Association. In addition, the inception of interdisciplinary conversation in this area should lead to greater attention to the ethical issues arising in citizen science research. The workshop should also lead to increased attention to citizen science research by specialists in research ethics. Such specialists typically focus on regulatory approaches while overlooking extra-regulatory research ethics issues; as a result, they do not provide appropriate guidance for researchers who go into the private sector and are not subject to regulatory requirements. This focus will serve to protect the well-being of citizens from possible risk and to protect the public's trust in the scientific enterprise. Technical Summary Though members of the lay public have in the past been involved in research, the current scale and rate of growth of citizen science is a new phenomenon. Perhaps due to this novelty, the use and deployment of citizens in research has surged ahead of sustained and intentional reflection on the ethical issues it can raise. Although there is a newly developed Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science toolkit (U.S. Federal Government, 2015), it does not even mention that ethical issues can arise in such work, let alone provide a means to address them. At the same time, many of these projects may not be mandated to receive any ethical oversight if they do not trigger regulatory requirements typically tied to federal funding. Given the fact that citizen science can be used in research already known to raise ethical issues (e.g., collecting identifying information from individuals) and that it can also raise new ethical issues (e.g., maintaining publicly available records of endangered species' dwelling locations), it is clear that citizen science needs to attend to ethical issues even when not compelled to by federal regulations. This workshop is designed to initiate attendance to these issues.