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

Subsequently, the author selected a number of influential citizen science projects at home
and abroad to uncover the business model. The selection criteria mainly derive from rankings
of the project popularity in the international citizen science web directory (https://ccsinventory.
wilsoncenter.org/), and after weighing project domain, project attributes (natural sciences,
humanities and social sciences, digital humanities) and participating countries, a total of 16
citizen science projects were selected for investigation. Then, the author tried to divide these
projects into different business models by judging the task description (target, granularity and
autonomy), sample size requirement, quality requirement, platform selection, entry barrier
and contribution degree of each citizen science project, as shown in Figure 2. Preliminary
results showed that each business model included corresponding citizen science projects, and
the exclusivity among business models was relatively obvious, and no project was beyond the
existing classification system. This shows that the framework set up in this paper can better
reflect the differentiation of citizen science projects.

3.2 Operation model of citizen science projects from the perspective of scientific
crowdsourcing

Zhao and Zhu (2014b) systematically expounded the operation mode of traditional crowdsourcing
project in the previous research, and extracted three entities, three attributes and nine operations
from the process of crowdsourcing activity. However, as mentioned above, although citizen science
projects are also subject to crowdsourcing activities, its situation, domain and path dependence
determine that the successful implementation of citizen science projects cannot directly transplant
the process of traditional crowdsourcing activities. At present, the operational process and
management countermeasures of citizen science projects are short of top-level strategic design,
with only some basic framework as guidance, rather than theoretical deduction and strategic
positioning for the general mode of scientific crowdsourcing, and some key issues in citizen
science are open for further exploration. For instance, how to describe, decompose and recommend
the tasks of citizen science projects on the basis of actual needs of the assigner and the actual
capabilities of the crowd worker? How to constantly attract volunteers to participate in citizen
science projects and provide them with necessary scientific and information literacy training? How
to conduct data management and knowledge discovery for scientific research data generated in
citizen science projects? To answer and solve these problems, the author deems that it is necessary
to improve the operation mode of citizen science projects and make innovations in process
design and management, so as to improve the efficiency, success rate and influence of citizen
science projects. In view of this, this paper, therefore, proposes to drive, manage and maintain
the development of citizen science projects with the idea of “institutional view”. To be specific, I
argue that the third party organization can be introduced on the basis of the original three entities
(i.e., assigner, platform and crowd worker). Organizations here refer to innovation incubation