Crowd and citizens science

In recent years citizens have increasingly been involved into the production of science and research, thanks to social networks and platform that enable a more direct contact between citizens and researchers. In a paper that was awarded the 2018 Richard R. Nelson Prize and in a follow-up study published in PNAS we investigated voluntary participation of citizens into science projects of www.zooniverse.com. At the moment, we are studying the involvement of citizens into the funding of science in a joint project with www.Experiment.com, a platform that enable scientists to crowdfund their research. More specifically, we aim at studying whether the decision to fund scientific research by citizens is affected by the perceived risk of failure of the research involved.