National networks of practitioners, dedicated funding instruments, and cultural change to open up science and infrastructure. Those measures are highlighted in a new EU report as key for building sustainable national environments for citizen science.
The report presents learnings from a year-long EU-funded Mutual Learning Exercise (MLE) to identify good practices, experiences and lessons learned along with policies and programmes for citizen science at local, regional and national levels. The MLE involved representatives from 11 countries, including VA (Public & Science) from Sweden.
The MLE’s Final Report stresses that to realise the full potential of citizen science, participatory and inclusive research practices need to be embedded and sustained at the national level.
The report therefore aims to serve as an inspiration, guide and resource for national policy makers, Research Funding Organisations (RFOs) and Research Performing Organisations (RPOs), who have a role in building a supporting and sustaining environment for citizen science.
The four most impactful recommendations for actions are to:
- Ensure that Citizen Science practitioners are supported by a national network of practitioners to share knowledge, form partnerships, and further develop best practice.
- Ensure that dedicated funding instruments can provide financial support to the places where it is most needed (especially to societal partners) in order to enable new initiatives to get off the ground and to provide ongoing funding or scaling-up funding for successful initiatives. These instruments should allow sufficient flexibility for co-creational approaches to be implemented.
- Enable the culture change required to open-up science and the scientific process more fully to the participation of citizens, societal actors, and civil society organisations for the benefit of research quality, policy impact, and improved societal welfare.
- Enable the establishment and development of key supportive infrastructure such as data-gathering tools and platforms, data analysis and visualisation tools, data hosting and archiving, and domain-specific research infrastructures.
Individual Thematic Reports are also available which include a more complete presentation of the workshop insights, best practice examples, case studies, and conclusions resulting from these sessions, as well as a reflection of the deeper discussions that took place.
Report findings will be presented and discussed at an international conference on Open Science from Policy to Practice on 16-17 May, which is being coordinated by VA. Anyone is invited to participate in the conference (in person or online) by registering their interest at www.oppenvetenskap.se
The Mutual Learning Exercise (MLE) on Citizen Science Initiatives – Policy and Practice was commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG R&I). Participating countries were Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Sweden. Representatives participated in workshops throughout the year, discussing and producing a series of Challenge Papers, Discussion Papers and Thematic Reports.
