Page 69 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

068 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.10, 2018

expensive to participate in or too small for the range of the target audience. In the meanwhile,
although a lot of research topics in the social sciences emphasize doing a certain scale of
researches through sample selection and sampling analysis, these researches usually take research
object or research target audience as the research object rather than the active subject of research
implementation, which also largely excludes the traditional survey or interview based social
science research project from the citizen science project. I believe that citizen science should
advocate the idea of “What comes from the people should absolutely benefit the people” in the
early stage of project positioning. Otherwise, it is impossible to succeed in breaking out of the
framework of traditional scientific community and achieve real open innovation. This is why
most projects on Innocentive crowdsourcing platform cannot be defined technically as science
projects. Scientific crowdsourcing therefore is not synonymous with citizen science. Scientific
crowdsourcing should be seen as an idea and paradigm for solving problems, while citizen science
emphasizes more on the publicity and social mission of the project. For example, Tao Zexuan’s
“The No. eight problem of savant” adopts the form of scientific crowdsourcing, but it cannot be
considered to be citizen science in that the public’s acceptance and understanding of such tasks
are far from enough and the need for feedback quantity and sample diversity is also low. And it’s
also worth noting that citizen science projects are generally aimed at the general public rather
than scientific researchers with specialized theoretical or domain knowledge. Therefore, the
divide between volunteers and scientists in citizen science projects should be relatively clear, and
volunteers’ contributions tend to be good-quality contents evolving or emerging from quantitative
accumulations. In consequence, although citizen science project is rooted in the idea of scientific
crowdsourcing, it can only be regarded as a specific form of scientific crowdsourcing, rather than
a strict equivalence to crowdsourcing. Cooper et al. (2007) believe that from the perspective of
terminology and standardization, the words “citizen science” should be clearly marked in research
papers and reports once volunteers participate. By doing so, the efficacy of citizen science will be
visualized, and it will be much helpful for subsequent researchers to summarize and tease out the
achievements in this field.

3.1 Business model of citizen science projects from the perspective of scientific
crowdsourcing

Over the past decade, citizen science projects abroad have received great attention and sustained
input from the scientific communities, non-profit organizations, innovation incubators and
government departments. China has also started to attach growing importance to and develop this
field in recent years. The author summarized the types and characteristics of citizen science projects
in the previous research, pointing out that citizen science projects involve particularly different
businesses, such as data collection, pattern recognition, sample evaluation, scheme selection, data
analysis and research design, etc. in accordance with the distinction of scientists or objectives of