Why Citizen Scientists Should be Paid
And why sharing your biodiversity data for free could undermine efforts to conserve biodiversity
In the mise en scène of what might be called “Science Twitter,” poses are struck, outfits strutted. Curiosity, arrogance, excitement, wonder, disbelief, celebration. It’s all there. And a popular message seems to be:
“Check this out. Who’s the scientist now, eh?”
None of this, of course, makes any sense without the caricature of a scientist. As you’d expect, Google’s image search still dresses its results for “scientist” in white lab coats. Every image? Pretty much. The entire first page at least.
Reality, of course, is more complex: Einstein with tousled hair, pipe, a chalkboard covered in formulae; or Einstein hoisting sails on his 20 metre boat in Germany? The high-collared dress of Marie Curie or Neil deGrasse Tyson and his wrestling one-piece? The hand-fan and floridity of Lovelace; or Feynman and his strip clubs?
Here’s the thing: Be they spiffed-up egghead in spectacles, or Juliets and Giovannis of the mind, society still seems stuck on a fundamental question.
What’s a scientist? And what are they good for?
BIG SCIENCE IS WATCHING
There are many answers, of course; historical, sociocultural, economic.
Big religions, big governments, big corporates, big patrons — they’ve always christened, garbed, employed their scientists in the hope that something of value might emerge; even as concepts such as value, reward, utility are like poison apples in the paradise of pure, honest, empirical thought.[1]
The end result is a mythos which portrays, at best, the sort of heroic figures we associate with the Enlightenment. I think of the “freethinkers,” of Voltaire’s Chateau Ferney with its laboratory on one side and a little playhouse on the other; or the 17th century scholar in Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle. At worst, the mythos can conjure layoffs, exiles, jail cells, beheadings; and here I think of a tyrannical clown with a sharpie pen.
The point is, by the time the dry table-read of science becomes a full-blown cinematic production, with the costumes and set design of what might be called Big Science, larger forces intervene. It could be a wartime economy, a monarchy, a Stalinist Russia, a fundamentalist religious state, or the sort of hyper-capitalism, OxyContin-type horror show you find in a J.G. Ballard novel.
Cut and splice and voila. Even the most intelligent, well-meaning scholar can mutate into something unrecognisable. The military celebrated DiVinci’s tanks, and transformed Oppenheimer into a “destroyer of worlds.” A relentless Christianity left its scars on poor Darwin’s marriage. Or more poignantly, think of the the case of Fritz and Clara Haber, devoted scientists, who found themselves horribly squeezed between the rock of their employer’s war effort and the hard-place of good, hard, reliable chemistry.
The despairing Clara, further crushed by the institutional weight of matrimony, would take her own life, while Fritz’s discoveries cleaved tragically between a new fertiliser that saved much of the world from famine and a poison gas that killed hundreds of thousands in World War I.[2]
THE CAPITAL “P” PROFESSOR
These are well-known, extreme examples.
Less extreme but very common examples exist all around us today, at research institutes like CSIRO, at natural history museums, at every single “Group of Eight” university in Australia.
“There are no species worth looking at around campus,” a biology professor at Melbourne University once scoffed at my suggestion his students might find value in using their mobile phones to map the species they encounter every day on the university grounds.
“When I want my students to study the environment, I’ll pack them onto a bus and take them to a nature reserve.”
On reflection, my encounter with this caricature of a scientist was a bit like meeting a gang-leader in an asylum. Beneath these platitudes existed many years of the inmate’s fight for survival; his fight for tenure, for authority. “There are Taxonomists [capital T],” he simpered at the idea of citizen science, “and then there are [air-quoting fingers] ‘taxonomists’.” Despite the institutional lobotomy he’d suffered, this bloviated pedagogue clearly wanted me to know that he was a Scientist with a capital S.
More importantly, as his demeanour suggested, he believed himself worthy of his position at the university — a position which, it turned out (although he didn’t know it), was supported in part by me. I had a child in his class, one of the many students being taught, falsely, grotesquely, that environmental science can only occur with capital “P” Professors and bus trips to faraway nature reserves.
Curiosity, reason, science for science’s sake, knowledge as its own reward and so forth — that didn’t seem to matter here. What seemed to matter was who survived as a professor of science and who didn’t.
That is to say, in the shaping of our perception of a scientist, what matters most — even more than who gets published, or who gets liked on Science Twitter — is who gets paid.
SCIENTISTS ARE NOT THE RIGHT PEOPLE TO SAVE SCIENCE
As Greta Thunberg and her fellow climate activists know so well, scientists are great at discovering truth; less great, unfortunately (but for good reason), at getting people to act on truth. Normally benign, this fact becomes calamitous — even, one could argue, amoral — when a giant clock of catastrophe a ticking. The isotopes that fascinated Marie Currie, or the planets that whirled through Isaac Newton’s dreams, existed as immutable truths. Timeless treasures to be extracted. Eternal laws to be deciphered. Nothing was on the verge of disappearing.
But in the modern biological sciences, some estimates suggest that 200 species are disappearing every day — the fastest rate of extinction in 66 million years. Given that only about 25% of the estimated 9 million or so species on earth (not including bacteria) have been scientifically described, the subject matter of much of biology is literally vanishing before our eyes.
And given that humanity, which of course includes Scientists with a capital “S”, depends on biodiversity for survival, the clock of catastrophe may well be set for nothing less than the total annihilation of human consciousness.
Or put another way, science may be closely observing its own death.
If that sounds extreme, that’s okay. You can take it or leave it. I’m not warning about the end of the world, or arguing about priorities here. I’m arguing, rather, that impact matters in the practice of science, that it’s always mattered, that it’s always been inescapable.
In the 1990s, when the US National Science Foundation (NSF) began explicitly asking grant applicants to explain the broader impact of their work on society, many scientists bristled at the idea. And for good reason. Why should curiosity require a social justification? Isn’t the emotional thrill of discovery — and the meaning it gives to society — impact enough? And isn’t there a danger in asking scientists to be pundits?
When the ornithologist Richard Prum received an NSF grant to study duck sex[3], what made his research so interesting is not that he anticipated how duck sex would force us to reexamine Darwin’s ideas about mate selection; it’s that he had no idea what he’d discover. It was the surprise of his findings.
Is there a “broader impact on society” when it comes to studying the size and shape of duck penises? Surely it can be articulated before the study begins. If an improved understanding of Darwinian mate selection can contribute to the health of biodiversity and the longevity of science, let’s not hesitate to say so.
No doubt there are scientists today who continue to object to the NSF’s requirement — even after 240 leading scientists signed a letter to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisting the government take action on the extinction crisis. Or even after April 22, 2017 (Earth Day, no coincidence), when hundreds of thousands of their colleagues felt compelled to take to the streets in the March for Science.
It seems that when faced with the obliteration of science as a vocation, a few impactful words on a placard — a bit of social activism — can suddenly appear quite sensible after all.
BEWARE THE SACRIFICE ECONOMY
Scientists, it’s important to remember, are a subset of citizen scientists. Not the other way around. In other words, all scientists are citizens, but not all citizens are scientists; ergo the “citizen scientist” includes all scientists.
Using a term like “citizen scientists” to classify amateur science buffs is a distortion of language — a distortion that’s institutional, or Big Science, in nature. It’s a clogging of logic that helps keep certain people employed, while preventing others, no matter how skilled or valuable their contribution, from questioning (good souls) their allocated role somewhere between (charitably) sacrificing volunteers and (uncharitably, unfortunately and most commonly) data sensors who don’t ask questions and don’t know any better.
“One of the main reasons I don’t often identify as a practitioner of citizen science is because a lot, though not all, of citizen science projects are based on a sacrifice economy,” says Dr. Max Liboiron, who runs the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research. “In a sacrifice economy, value continually accrues to people with more privilege (usually accredited scientists) and it’s usually drawn from folks with less privilege.”
Seen this way, it’s difficult to overstate the irony of Australian federal and state governments offering citizen science grants to projects led by accredited scientists. Nothing wrong with these projects, but call them what they are: Research projects. Or science communication projects. But certainly not citizen science projects.
When we look at how the money is spent, it rarely (ever?) goes to the so-called citizen scientists, who are paid instead with lip service, inspiring headlines and endless gratitude at awards ceremonies. So rather than empowering the public to engage in science, the accredited scientists are simply generating publicity, elevating their own research, solidifying their own role as scientific arbiters, and thus achieving the exact opposite of their publicity pitch.
They’re receiving a kind of social license to ignore the aspirations of society.
I appreciate this kind of arrogance. Really, I do. I know the financial nosedive that follows one’s sacrifice to truth. I know how hard scientists (like their starving artists cousins) must work to achieve any sort of recognition, let alone a sizeable pay-cheque. Given the agonising, endless amount of cerebral labour required to practice science, social skills can quickly atrophy. The beach body of self confidence can start to sag. Ostracism, loneliness, resentment. A sense of superiority — which on “Science Twitter” manifests itself in a tone of “look how silly my grad students are” — is really the only counter-punch to these psychological blows. Arrogance becomes a necessary means of survival.
“There are Taxonomists, and then there are taxonomists.”
But in a time when a 16 year-old is pleading with the United Nations to change its behaviour or risk annihilation; or when Big Social Media is creating an economy based on the easy purchasing of eyeballs and popularity; or when Big Tech and Big Autocracies (in almost equal measure, it seems) are working hard to control human agency through mass surveillance; it’s hard to dismiss the scientist’s sense of entitlement here.
It’s hard to believe that yet another research grant for yet another accredited scientist, at yet another elite institution, is somehow more important than the massive, collective, democratic, scientific action required to stop something like a mass extinction of life on Earth.
“We need to build a science,” says the biologist Edward O. Wilson, founder of the Half-Earth Project and a towering figure in biodiversity conservation. “We need an ecosystems science. And if there is going to be one created, it should be, has to be, in the immediate future.”
Not practice science, but build a science. In other words, the science doesn’t exist right now. Whether we like it or not, the one we create will be determined by its impact — the impact, in this case, being how well it protects ecosystems. Building such a science, so quickly, will likely require us to disrupt the Big Science model looming over us today — a model where scientists are only paid if they’re institutionally affiliated and deeply specialised. We need a system that distributes a wide range of financial reward, based on a combination of scientific rigour and value to ecosystem protection, across a broad spectrum of scientific practice and expertise.
And as Wilson makes clear, we need it now.
Luckily, with 2.5 billion people having access to smartphones, this kind of science can start to emerge.
THE PRACTICALITY OF PAYING CITIZEN SCIENTISTS
Any argument suggesting it’s somehow impractical to pay citizen scientists is ludicrous at a time when 36% of the US economy (according to a recent Gallup report) is part of a what’s known as the “gig economy,” being paid for driving cars, letting out rooms, plumbing, cooking, coding, landscaping, writing books, playing music and just about every other trade you can think of.
At a recent Ag-tech awards ceremony I attended for school kids in Queensland, many of the adult presenters, by some psychological default setting, praised the young award winners as “our future scientists.” But these kids had spent many hours closely observing nature, looking for invasive pests, submitting geo-located photos, identifying specimens, writing field notes. The data they collected went via QuestaGame to the Atlas of Living Australia — forming part of a refined data set which has been cited in 73 scientific publications this year.
If these kids’ observations lacked a required detail, it wasn’t something that a little technology couldn’t fix (a micro-lens camera, a DNA sensor, or some other device). The fact is, cloud-based software, open AI systems, hand-held devices, large online communities — these things can produce scientific results as valuable as anything coming out of the offices of CSIRO.
So rather than our “future scientists,” weren’t these kids also our current scientists?
They were curious, passionate, hard-working; and QuestaGame scored their participation based on an objective, double-blind peer review analysis of their contributions from top experts in the field. These scores made it easy to determine the amount of reward each person should receive (not perfect, sure, but no worse than current grading systems). So why shouldn’t they be rewarded as such? And if we can reward kids — with points, or virtual game gold — why can’t we reward citizen scientists with real money?
I’m not the first to make the case for paying citizen scientists. Dr. Liboiron, for instance, has insisted on treating her citizen scientists as colleagues and co-authors, and paying them accordingly. Nor is this the first time I’ve made the case (see “We All Benefit When ‘Citizen Scientists’ Get Paid,” 10 Sept 2016). And I’m certainly not the first person to suggest that people should be remunerated for their contribution to society.[4]
But there appears to be a gaping blindspot to the idea that perhaps a more open science, moderated by well-designed communications systems, can both produce more impactful science and (through its democratisation) strengthen the public trust in science. I still find it astonishing, for example, that so many leading citizen science apps today are using their participants’ data to train artificial intelligence models without clearly informing the participants or giving them the right to decide. A simple settings option: Use my data for Artificial Intelligence? Yes/No. How hard is that?
But when I raised the issue at the Citizen Science Association conference in North Carolina earlier this year, I was met, literally, with blank stares. It was as if no one had ever considered that the public might distrust Big Science, or at the very least have a right to decide for itself who or what it should trust.
The fact is, many of the people most knowledgeable about local environments are not accredited scientists; and Big Science, with all the institutional costumery and backbiting, is much too quick to dismiss their contribution. (This can be especially true with indigenous knowledge). It’s all or nothing. You‘re paid or not paid. There’s no middle ground.
Yet given the urgency of the extinction crisis, the middle ground is not something we can afford to ignore.
CITIZEN SCIENCE ON AN UBER RIDE
There’s a bit of scientist in just about all of us. We can’t help but seek out truth because we’re united in the madness of our mortality, that brief candle of consciousness which, when examined (and unlike fire) makes no sense. We act out our lives against a backdrop of nothingness, and attempts to construct some one-size-fits-all profession of science will only produce its own monstrosities: the Orwellian informant, the holy hypocrite, a huckster for the most powerful person on Earth.
I’ll conclude with a story.
I’m riding in an Uber in Melbourne’s CBD, on my way to meet a video game developer. The driver, a cheerful mother of three who moved to Australia from Russia about a decade ago, is telling me stories about her children.
“The middle one,” she says, her face lighting up at the thought of her seven-year-old son. “He’s very peculiar. There’s something different about him.”
How so?
“He’s obsessed with insects — or rather, spiders,” she explains. “He loves spiders. He’s got a special mind for it. A scientific mind.”
She tells me she recently purchased a field guide about spiders for her son.
Is it by Robert Whyte, I ask?
“Yes, that’s the one. Such a great book.” She laughs. “I never had any interest before, but every day now we go out looking for spiders.”
I know Robert Whyte through QuestaGame. He’s the system’s highest rated expert on Australian spiders. His Field Guide to Spiders of Australia, which he wrote with Greg Anderson, is considered the most comprehensive account of Australian spiders ever published.
But what a lot of people don’t realise is that Robert is not an accredited scientist. In fact (get this), he’s not even able to access the latest scientific journals about spiders because that would require a PhD and institutional affiliation.
So here we are.
“We know so little about the spiders of Australia,” says Robert. “There’s so much out there to discover. Venoms, protein structures, all sorts of miraculous things that can be solving many of the world’s problems.”
If we’re going to discover these things before they disappear, we need more scientists, young and old, from all walks of life, collaborating across a global network designed to value empirical truth. These scientists need to feel motivated. Their work rewarded; which means they need to be paid, so that ultimately we see less Twitter role-playing and more actual, collaborative, scientific practice helping navigate us through some of the greatest existential challenges facing us today.
If we’re really going to shift the paradigm, if we’re going to create a new kind of science that can protect life on Earth, we don’t have time to lose. We can’t let Big Science slow us down.
—
- The infamous tree of Genesis, it seems to me, is not about scientific discovery, of which Eden, with its assortment of delicious fruits, is plentiful. Rather, it’s about the knowledge of good and evil, or the sort of intellectual hubris or know-it-all sanctimony that deludes us into thinking we alone can steer our science toward good or bad outcomes (think Doctor Moreau in Well’s Island, as opposed to Shuri in The Black Panther).
- An interesting article about Haber’s post-war attempts at redemption: https://io9.gizmodo.com/germany-s-post-world-war-i-scheme-to-extract-gold-from-499793752?IR=T
- The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us, Richard O. Prum, New York, Doubleday, 2018.
- I’ve spent the last 4–5 years helping engineer a system that rewards citizen scientists by distributing payments among conservation organisations they support (see for example BioExpertise.org, BioSMART.LIFE, https://questagame.com/paystoknow). I’m also involved in BioCOIN.LIFE which will soon allow financial rewards for citizen scientists involved in biodiversity mapping.
