Open Science as the new normal, Citizen Science as the new component of research infrastructure
- Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications, Bellaterra, Spain (k.otsu@creaf.uab.cat)
The increasing involvement of citizens in scientific projects over the last decade is another critical factor that has encouraged Open and FAIR data. Citizen science is in fact one of the eight priorities of the European Open Science Agenda (2018), along with the establishment of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) enabling a federation of multidisciplinary research infrastructures.
Until now, citizen science projects and platforms, also known as Citizen Observatories (COs) in Europe, are yet to be considered among the research sector in the EOSC ecosystem. With the ambition of overcoming this challenge, the Cos4Cloud (Co-designed Citizen Observatories Services for the EOS-Cloud) project was the first ‘Enabling an operational, open and FAIR EOSC ecosystem (INFRAEOSC)’ project to include citizen science as a core part of research infrastructure.
Specifically, the Cos4Cloud aimed to integrate citizen science in the EOSC through co-designing innovative services to support widely used COs in biodiversity and environmental monitoring. To make COs interoperable, the services adopted internationally recognized standards such as SensorThings API and Darwin Core. As a result, over 30 interoperability experiments have been reported in various combinations among the new services and existing COs during the project period; some of which are now offered in the EOSC Marketplace following open and FAIR principles. The Cos4Colud has also demonstrated that the services combined with AI technologies and robust algorithms could improve COs by leveraging the data quality to the research grade.
We thus expect more resources and services derived from COs to be reused in the EOSC ecosystem, eventually enabling to establish its own thematic cluster for citizen science in the research infrastructure as well as facilitate the reuse of data by other researchers. We conclude with the key role of such diverse scientific communities enriched in the EOSC that may create a bridge among researchers, citizens and decision-makers.
(This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 863463.)
How to cite: Otsu, K. and Masó, J.: Open Science as the new normal, Citizen Science as the new component of research infrastructure, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-172, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-172, 2023.
