Citizen Science as a tool for Open Science

Citizen Science as a tool for Open Science

The most interesting topic among the ones taught in this Open Science course was the one about citizen science. That’s why I decided to check Scistarter, a website that listed a lot of citizen science projects [1]. When looking for projects related to my field, Engineering, I found two interesting ones:

Potential Penguin [2]

Potential Penguin is a game that facilitates the learning of classical Physics concepts. By modifying the terrain, you have to help the penguin reach the goal with the indicated amount of potential and kinetic energy.

By playing the game, you are contributing to the project in two ways:

  • How visualization can help in learning physics concepts
  • What improves the performance in our quantum games

Project Sidewalk [3]

Project Sidewalk uses labels placed by users to improve city planning, build accessibility-aware mapping tools, and train machine learning algorithms to automatically find accessibility issues. There are two ways of collaborating with the project: placing labels or verifying labels placed by other users.

Example of label verification
Example of label placement

What am I doing to improve Open Science

To generally improve the progress of the Open Science initiative, I’ve sent two papers to two different journals as Open Access publications (paying fees up to 2500 euros before taxes …). These papers are part of the research done for the European project Labyrinth , part of the Horizon2020 initiative, which promotes Open Science.

References

  1. SciStarter – SciStarter. (2021). Retrieved 2 July 2021, from https://scistarter.org/
  2. Games, S. A. H. : C. S. (n.d.). ScienceAtHome: Games: Potential Penguin. ScienceAtHome.org. https://www.scienceathome.org/games/potential-penguin/.
  3. Project Sidewalk. (2021). Retrieved 2 July 2021, from https://sidewalk-sea.cs.washington.edu/
  4. Labyrinth 2020 – Ensuring drone traffic control and safety. (2021). Retrieved 2 July 2021, from http://labyrinth2020.eu/

2 Comments
  1. Avatar photo Eva Méndez says:

    Thank you for learning. I am happy that you got “citizen science” in your top interesting topics.
    Just a nuance on your last comment, when you mentioned that your project under H2020 paid for APCs (Authoring Processing Charges). Paying for opening up the knowledge is fine, as soon as it is the only thing you pay for. It also really complies with PlanS: the idea of paying for publishing processes instead of paying for the reading-only subscription model. But the Gold Open Access is only an option for opening up your publications, and publishing in gold, never excludes to deposit/publish your paper in the repository as well (or instead)… think carefully about all these concepts, because it is one of the common misunderstandings about Open Access.

    1. jamunozm says:

      Thanks for your answer Eva, I’ll have a better look at it. I’m writing a new paper for the MDPI journal, which is completely Open Access.

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