A capacity-building and brokering network to make citizen science an integral part of the European Research Area

Citizen Science is a rapidly emerging mode of research and innovation that shows huge promise in terms of collecting new qualities and quantities of data, harnessing collective intelligence, improving science-society literacy, and improving the relationship between science and society. However, it is embedded institutionally only to a limited extent, at an early stage of developing data infrastructures, and lacks the capacities and sustainable resourcing required to live up to its potentials.

This action will become a central point of exchange between citizen science in Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, and other EU-level and sub-national programmes and initiatives. It should amplify significant outcomes of citizen science in areas such as Horizon Europe’s Missions, should they be confirmed, Clusters and Partnerships, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Green Deal, across all parts of the research and innovation system. It should maintain up-to-date repositories of initiatives, good practices and tools, and become a stage for discussion and collaboration.

It should offer extensive in situ brokering, skills, training, and capacity building services to citizen science practitioners, civil society, public authorities, businesses/SMEs, formal and informal education establishments, and research funding and performing organisations, with a view to raising their awareness, knowledge and skills to collaborate with, support, and implement citizen science.

Co-ordination of and support for citizen science to work towards FAIR (and in many cases open) data should cut across activities. The action should become a key interlocutor between citizen science initiatives and existing thematic databases and infrastructures. It should support - and ‘connect the dots’ between - existing efforts to make citizen science data FAIR and open, make new efforts to liaise between citizen science and infrastructures where they are needed, identify unmet needs, and develop policy recommendations. Overall the action should move citizen science towards open science as its modus operandi.

Underlying these activities should be efforts to reduce disparities in awareness and actual practice of citizen science across disciplines in the ERA (e.g. at local, regional, national and EU levels). Moreover, significant efforts should be made to be inclusive in citizens’ involvement in terms of geography, gender, ethnicity, disability, age, socio-economic background etc. In order to achieve the expected outcomes, international cooperation and mutual learning that promise tangible scientific, societal or policy impacts is advised.

The action should build on and valorise the results of earlier projects in the Science and Society (FP6), Science in Society (FP7) and Science with and for Society (Horizon 2020) programmes, in particular projects focused on public engagement, responsible research and innovation, and citizen science , as well as of national and regional initiatives, and should aim to provide a seamless transition between previous supporting actions and this new action.

The action should be no shorter than 3 years.