Workshop: Ethical Issues in Citizen Science Research

该奖项支持一个研讨会，该研讨会旨在将公民科学参与者和实践者与科学、技术和社会领域的研究伦理学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伦理关注的领域。资金将用于交通、住宿、食物和会议组织。研讨会的产品将包括向公众提供的会议摘要以及公民科学协会的新期刊《公民科学：理论与实践》中的在线开放获取学术出版物。此外，这一领域的跨学科对话的开始应引起人们对公民科学研究中出现的伦理问题的更多关注。讲习班还应引起研究伦理专家对公民科学研究的更多关注。这些专家通常侧重于监管方法，而忽视了监管外的研究道德问题；因此，他们不会为进入私营部门且不受监管要求约束的研究人员提供适当的指导。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。技术概述尽管过去曾有公众参与研究，但公民科学目前的规模和增长速度是一个新现象。也许正是由于这种新颖性，在对可能引发的伦理问题进行持续和有意的思考之前，公民在研究中的使用和部署已经激增。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)，但它甚至没有提到此类工作中可能会出现伦理问题，更不用说提供解决这些问题的手段了。与此同时，如果这些项目没有触发通常与联邦资金相关的监管要求，它们中的许多项目可能不会被强制接受任何道德监督。鉴于公民科学可以用于已知的引发伦理问题的研究(例如，收集个人的身份信息)，也可能引发新的伦理问题(例如，维护濒危物种栖息地的公开记录)，显然，公民科学需要关注伦理问题，即使联邦法规没有强制这样做。这个研讨会的目的就是让人们开始关注这些问题。

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.