Page 60 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

ZHAO Yuxiang / A preliminary exploration on citizen science projects based on scientific crowdsourcing perspectives: 059
Conceptualization, pattern design and research opportunities

in the business environment, and has promoted the concept and spirit of Internet in terms of its
equality, openness, transboundary and fusion. It is worth noting that when problems and tasks are
proposed with the main purpose of scientific discovery and solving scientific challenges, and the
project is primarily initiated by scientific research institutions and scientists, crowdsourcing then
evolves from the traditional business model into a new network scientific research collaboration
model. This transmutation leads to new forms of scientific crowdsourcing based on mass
participation and collaboration in the Internet environment like citizen science. For one thing, the
paradigm of science communication has changed greatly, from a model of science popularization
and public comprehending science to a new paradigm of public participation and public designing
science (Hu & Tang, 2015). For another, the advance of information technology provides a new
platform for the general public to display the wisdom of crowds, and scientists can also release
scientific tasks through the Internet and recruit the public to participate in scientific research.
Therefore, scientific researches could be conducted in a distributed way, and scientific research
and technological innovation can be completed jointly (G.Newman et al., 2012).
Citizen science, also known as public science, crowd science, community science, public
participation in scientific research, refers to open science movement (Bonney et al., 2009; Niu,
Zhao, & Zhu, 2017; S.B. Zhang et al., 2013) that non-professional scientists, science enthusiasts
and ordinary volunteers participate in, and it covers the fields of scientific research and exploration,
technological development and innovation, emergency response, environmental protection, resource
exploitation and utilization and so on (Curtis, 2015; Cooper, Dickinson, Phillips, & Bonney, 2007).
In this process, the public may get involved in one or more aspects of scientific activities, including
research scheme design, data collection, project personnel recruitment, data analysis and processing,
and the cooperative publication of scientific research results, etc. (Silvertown, 2009). Wiederhold
(2011) deems that in the new Internet environment, anyone who gets access to the Internet has the
potential to become a crowd scientist. Traditional scientific research activities are mainly carried
out by professional researchers or teams, and citizens usually participate less in the creation and
production process of scientific theory and practice (Sagarra, Gutierrez-Roig, Bonhoure, & Perelló,
2016), or they mainly act as the research object (commonly in social science) and experimental
subject (commonly in natural science) in certain scientific research process. However, a growing
number of scientists and research teams have realized that it is extremely difficult for them to
cope better, faster and more accurately with various research tasks in the face of complicated data
scales and forms, as well as flexible sample objects. Therefore, to design citizen science projects
scientifically and reasonably and to call for more volunteers to participate in research activities
provide a potentially feasible course of action for various current research bottlenecks (Baker, 2016).
General Secretary Xi Jinping stressed at the “Three Science and Technology Conferences”
in 2016 that “Science and technology innovation, and scientific popularization are two wings
of innovation and development. And scientific popularization should be put on an equal
footing with science and technology innovation, so that the innovative wisdom of hundreds of