A growing amount of scientific research is done in an open collaborative fashion, in projects sometimes referred to as “crowd science”, “citizen science”, or “networked science”. Crowd science projects are largely characterized by two important features: participation in a project is open to a wide base of potential contributors, and intermediate inputs such as data or problem-solving algorithms are made openly available.
Aims:
Crowd science is scientific research that is conducted with the participation of volunteers who are not professional scientists. Thanks to the Internet and online platforms, project initiators can draw on a potentially large number of volunteers. This crowd can be involved to support data-rich or labour-intensive projects that would otherwise be unfeasible.
Methods and applications:
OpenSourceResearch collaboration launched as a crowd science initiative in 2018. It has been growing in size and global reach since then. We are working:
Using social media to conduct research
We have already published one research article based on this project.
Using social media to improve patient-reported outcome measures
We have already published one research article based on this project.
New areas of collaboration in research (implementation of IT)
We have already published 5 research articles based on this project.