DOI: 10.3897/rio.9.e96476

Authors: Étienne Serbe-Kamp, Jens Bemme, Daniel Pollak, Katja Mayer

Abstract: Citizen Science or community science has been around for a long time. The scope of community involvement in Citizen Science initiatives ranges from short-term data collection to intensive engagement to delve into a research topic together with scientists and/or other volunteers. Although many volunteer researchers have academic training, it is not a prerequisite for participation in research projects. It is important to adhere to scientific standards, which include, above all, transparency with regard to the methodology of data collection and public discussion of the results, and open educational resources (OER). Hereby, Citizen Science is closely linked to Open Science. In our contribution, we will introduce two projects, both developed within the Wikimedia Fellowship Freies Wissen.The top-down approach: ERGo! An Entomology Research Tool to raise awareness of biodiversity protection.Inclusion in academia and pressing social problems such as climate change are fundamentally social justice issues. To facilitate early participation in the scientific process on the part of people holding underrepresented identities in science, we develop a Citizen Science initiative based on a low-cost open-source platform (ERGo!) to perform a technique for electrical recordings from insect eyes known as electroretinograms (ERGs) while presenting visual stimuli. Pasadena Unified School District High School students pilot ERG experiments to test the feasibility of this technique as a large-scale Citizen Science initiative. With ERGo!, future Citizen Scientists contribute data to cutting-edge research that monitors insect biodiversity, adaptation, and health in rapidly changing environments caused by monocultures, pesticides, and climate change.The bottom-up approach: Open cultural data collection. A Citizen Science initiative for regional knowledge curation.We catalogued the 18th century German magazine ‘Die Gartenlaube’ (in Wikisource) with bibliographic metadata in Wikidata in a project called ‘Die Datenlaube’. We develop collaborative approaches for linked open data methods to produce data sets about historical knowledge. The concept of ‘Open Citizen Science’ offers a methodological baseline for Open Science practises in fields of digital humanities. Scanned documents and structured open metadata revealed open access to historic collections. Through the Wikimedia platforms 'Die Datenlaube' creates possibilities to edit entries, to design own investigations, and to contribute to OER.Based on the elaboration of the two rather different projects (natural and social sciences, involvement of pupils vs citizens, top-down vs bottom-up), we will discuss similarities and hence the challenges and lessons learned for using and developing Open Science elements in Citizen Science and mutual learning. Furthermore, we will conclude by focusing on the opportunities resulting from the integration of societal expectations in science and vice versa.

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DOI: 10.3897/rio.9.e95174

Authors: Oliver Keller, Stefan Appelhoff, Benjamin Paffhausen, Tobias Wenzel

Abstract: The promise of open hardware as a branch of open science is a sustainable change of research instrumentation towards more openly documented and licensed designs. Methods, code, and data are already valued by journal editors and peer-reviews to judge if a study's result can be replicated with the information provided in a manuscript. The open hardware movement seeks to include laboratory tools and research instrumentation into the same category. Availability of and access to open hardware equipment are set to democratize professional lab work and field studies as well as enhance the transferability of methods to civic science settings. Here, we report four case studies from the first five years of the Wikimedia Program "Free Knowledge", an open science fellowship funded by Wikimedia Germany and partners. The project developers discuss and evaluate the impact related to key aspects typically attributed with open hardware: costs, availability, adaptability, community and educational value. The open hardware projects covered in this review span from natural sciences to life sciences to education.

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DOI: 10.3897/rio.8.e89980

Authors: Rima-Maria Rahal, Hanjo Hamann, Hilmar Brohmer, Florian Pethig

Abstract: The open and transparent documentation of scientific processes has been established as a core antecedent of free knowledge. This also holds for generating robust insights in the scope of research projects. To convince academic peers and the public, the research process must be understandable and retraceable (reproducible), and repeatable (replicable) by others, precluding the inclusion of fluke findings into the canon of insights. In this contribution, we outline what reproducibility and replicability (R&R) could mean in the scope of different disciplines and traditions of research and which significance R&R has for generating insights in these fields. We draw on projects conducted in the scope of the Wikimedia "Open Science Fellows Program" (Fellowship Freies Wissen), an interdisciplinary, long-running funding scheme for projects contributing to open research practices. We identify twelve implemented projects from different disciplines which primarily focused on R&R, and multiple additional projects also touching on R&R. From these projects, we identify patterns and synthesize them into a roadmap of how research projects can achieve R&R across different disciplines. We further outline the ground covered by these projects and propose ways forward.

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