Workshop: Ethical Issues in Citizen Science Research

一般观众摘要 该奖项支持一个研讨会，旨在将公民科学参与者和从业者与科学，技术和社会领域的研究伦理和相关研究领域的学者聚集在一起，以确定，描述和解决公民科学中的伦理问题。资金将用于交通、住宿、食品和会议组织。研讨会的成果将包括向公众提供的会议摘要，以及公民科学协会新杂志《公民科学：理论与实践》上的在线开放式学术出版物。此外，在这一领域的跨学科对话的开始，应导致更多的关注公民科学研究中出现的伦理问题。讲习班还应促使研究伦理专家更加重视公民科学研究。这些专家通常侧重于监管方法，而忽视监管外的研究伦理问题;因此，他们不为进入私营部门的研究人员提供适当的指导，不受监管要求的约束。这一重点将有助于保护公民的福祉免受可能的风险，并保护公众对科学事业的信任。 技术总结 虽然在过去，非专业人士也参与过研究，但目前公民科学的规模和增长速度是一个新现象。也许是由于这种新奇，公民在研究中的使用和部署已经超过了对它可能引起的伦理问题的持续和有意识的反思。虽然有一个新开发的联邦众包和公民科学工具包（美国联邦政府，2015年），它甚至没有提到道德问题可能出现在这样的工作，更不用说提供一种方法来解决这些问题。与此同时，如果这些项目不触发通常与联邦资金挂钩的监管要求，它们中的许多项目可能不会被授权接受任何道德监督。鉴于公民科学可以用于已知会引起伦理问题的研究（例如，从个人收集识别信息），并且它还可能引起新的伦理问题（例如，保存濒危物种居住地的公开记录），很明显，公民科学需要关注伦理问题，即使不是联邦法规所强制的。该研讨会旨在启动对这些问题的关注。

General Audience Summary This award supports a workshop that is designed to bring together citizen science participants and practitioners with scholars in research ethics and related areas of research in the field of Science, Technology, and Society to identify, describe, and address areas of ethical concern in citizen science. Funds will be used for transportation, lodging, food, and conference organization. Products from the workshop will include summaries of sessions made available to the public and online, open-access scholarly publications in "Citizen Science: Theory and Practice," the new journal of the Citizen Science Association. In addition, the inception of interdisciplinary conversation in this area should lead to greater attention to the ethical issues arising in citizen science research. The workshop should also lead to increased attention to citizen science research by specialists in research ethics. Such specialists typically focus on regulatory approaches while overlooking extra-regulatory research ethics issues; as a result, they do not provide appropriate guidance for researchers who go into the private sector and are not subject to regulatory requirements. This focus will serve to protect the well-being of citizens from possible risk and to protect the public's trust in the scientific enterprise. Technical Summary Though members of the lay public have in the past been involved in research, the current scale and rate of growth of citizen science is a new phenomenon. Perhaps due to this novelty, the use and deployment of citizens in research has surged ahead of sustained and intentional reflection on the ethical issues it can raise. Although there is a newly developed Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science toolkit (U.S. Federal Government, 2015), it does not even mention that ethical issues can arise in such work, let alone provide a means to address them. At the same time, many of these projects may not be mandated to receive any ethical oversight if they do not trigger regulatory requirements typically tied to federal funding. Given the fact that citizen science can be used in research already known to raise ethical issues (e.g., collecting identifying information from individuals) and that it can also raise new ethical issues (e.g., maintaining publicly available records of endangered species' dwelling locations), it is clear that citizen science needs to attend to ethical issues even when not compelled to by federal regulations. This workshop is designed to initiate attendance to these issues.