We are pleased to welcome into the world the new journal “Citizen Science: Theory and Practice” – one hope for this Citizen Science Today aggregator site is to bring forward grey literature from e.g. blog posts and promote it as an important part of the emerging conversation on citizen science that CSTP will only enhance. — LFF —
The field of citizen science is growing with breathtaking speed. Thousands of citizen science projects are now under way around the world, engaging millions of individuals in the process of scientific discovery. In the US, citizen science has been featured at the White House and the federal government has launched a website to showcase federally funded citizen science projects (citizenscience.gov). The largest research and innovation funding program in the European Union, Horizon 2020, is investing heavily in citizen science to tackle societal problems. The Australian government has published a vision for citizen science throughout the country (Pecl et al. 2015). Three professional associations supporting citizen science recently have been launched: The Citizen Science Association (CSA; citizenscience.org), the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA; ecsa.citizen-science.net), and the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA; citizenscience.org.au/). Some researchers consider citizen science to have emerged as a distinct field of inquiry (e.g., Jordan et al. 2015). Dozens of articles focused on citizen science are appearing every month, some in prestigious journals such as Science, Nature, and Bioscience, and a number of journals across a huge range of disciplines recently have or soon will publish special issues on citizen science, including Ecology and Society, Journal of Science Communication, Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education, Conservation Biology, and Biological Conservation.
In this exploding citizen science landscape, what is the role of Citizen Science: Theory and Practice (CSTP)?
CSTP is an online, open access, interdisciplinary and international journal sponsored by the CSA in cooperation with ECSA and ACSA. As a global venue for scholarly exchange about citizen science, the journal’s focus is to explore and better understand citizen science in all its facets — for example, lessons from successes and failures in the development and implementation of citizen science tools and projects; techniques for the communication and visualization of project results and measurement of outcomes; and critical examination of the many ways that citizen science can yield a range of scientific, educational, and social outcomes.
Photo Credit: Photo by Karlie Roland, NPS, via North Cascades National Park on Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Photo appears in article.
Source: The Theory and Practice of Citizen Science: Launching a New Journal
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