Chris Santos-Lang, Author at Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences

07 Mar 2019

Special Collection: Ethical Issues in Citizen Science

Ethics, Journal

Collection launched: 07 Mar 2019 Image by Ed Gregory via Stokpic. Citizen science can challenge existing ethical norms because it falls outside of customary methods of ensuring that research is conducted ethically. What ethical issues arise when engaging the public in research? How have these issues been addressed, and how should they be addressed in the future? Several papers in this collection of Citizen Science: Theory and Practice address collaborations with human beings: What to call them when they are not mere passive subjects of research; what ethical issues arise when citizen scientists are also patients reporting their own data;…

31 Jan 2019

By Chris Santos-Lang

How to Make Your Research Transparent

Ethics, Webinars

You are invited to a free webinar. Noon EST on 31 January 2019, with Chris Santos-Lang This webinar is a practical how-to demonstrating some of the latest technologies developed to satisfy the transparency principles in the European Citizen Science Association's Ten Principles of Citizen Science and the DIYbio Codes of Ethics. It will demonstrate two free solutions as examples: One is the Open Science Framework and the other is a homespun mixture of Google Drive, Google Sites, and FigShare. Both solutions leverage PubPeer, Creative Commons licenses, and research standards. This webinar also introduces the "APRICOT" mnemonic to map the range…

30 Nov 2018

By Chris Santos-Lang

Situation Assessment and Stakeholder Analysis for Citizen Science

Ethics, Webinars

A Free Webinar from CSA's Ethics Working Group, presented by Dr. Stacy Lynn (Colorado State University) Friday, 30 Nov 2018, 12-1pm US EST (UTC -5) Situation assessment and stakeholder analysis (SASA) is a deliberate process of identifying and planning goals, future steps, collaborations, common interests and potential challenges that might be faced by a new or ongoing citizen science project. Well-thought-out SASA processes provide a thoughtful foundation for carrying out inclusive and ethical engagement and research. This helps both to ensure that project goals are in line with stakeholder needs, and to protect people and study subjects from harm. The SASA…

11 Sep 2018

By Chris Santos-Lang

What’s Happening with the CSA Ethics Working Group?

AAPS News, Ethics, Webinars

Image Credit: Madhumathi S V [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] Post by Chris Santos-Lang, Co-Chair, CSA Ethics Working Group Have you noticed the risk of reinventing the wheel, wasting precious resources to solve problems that other scientists have already solved? Have you noticed universities and laboratories providing tools which their researchers use to build upon each other's solutions? Have you noticed that a bunch of those tools fit under the category "Ethics"? The purpose of the CSA Ethics Working Group is to provide reusable ethics tools relevant to citizen science analogous to existing tools for non-citizen-science. We have started by building…

16 Aug 2017

By Chris Santos-Lang

How to Handle Citizen Theoreticians

Ethics, Resources

Opinion by Chris Santos-Lang Some citizen scientists help collect data; some design experiments; some participate in ethics review of research plans; and some propose new theories for scientific testing. I am hereby endorsing Kevin Maney's term "citizen theoreticians" for this fourth kind of citizen scientist, and will discuss four examples here. This fourth kind of citizen scientist raises the ethical issue of inconvenient truth. As Marc Edwards told us in the opening keynote of CSA 2017, the truth about the Flint water supply was "inconvenient" in the sense that professional scientists faced political pressure to avoid investigating it. One reason why…

Author: Chris Santos-Lang