Category: Citizen Science

When collaboration becomes co-optation: Citizen Science as Public Relations

Citizen science and its counterpart citizen social science are becoming increasingly established as research tools to address global and societal challenges. However, increased interaction between research and society also presents questions related to…

New research must be better reported, the future of society depends on it

Academics looking to communicate the findings and value of their research to wider audiences are increasingly going through the media to do so. But, argues Andy Tattersall, poor or incomplete reporting can undermine respect for experts by misrepresenting research, especially by trivialising or sensationalising it, or publishing under inappropriate headlines and with cherry-picked statistics. Proper and accurate communication of science […]

Science is a social process: facilitating community interactions across the research lifecycle

Modern day research practice is incredibly collaborative, increasingly interdisciplinary and a very social process. Sierra Williams underlines the importance of researchers and publishers alike recognising publication as one aspect of a much wider social process. By way of introduction to her role at peer-reviewed open access publisher PeerJ, she reflects on the purpose of community in science communication. Where do […]

A snapshot of life on the savannah

Our latest featured data package is from Alexandra Swanson and colleagues at the Snapshot Serengeti project, and accompanies their peer-reviewed article in Scientific Data.  It provides a unique resource for studying the one of the world’s most extraordinary mammal assemblages and also for studies of computer vision and machine learning. In addition, data from Snapshot Serengeti is already being used in biology and computer science classrooms to enable […]

Interns Summer in Review, Part 5: Learning (and teaching) the art of scientific investigations

It has been over two years since I was last in the woods of New Hampshire collecting invasive plant data for my undergraduate research. From then to now, I have thought little about data sets or statistical variability. Instead, I have focused on getting thirteen-year-old kids to simply grasp the concept that Earth has seasons …

Continue reading »