Sam Falconer


In 2010, the first scientific paper written by school children (eight to ten years old) was published in Biology Letters. It was on the foraging strategies of bees and began with the phrase "Once upon a time". What struck me when I read this study was not the child-friendly language, although it is one of the most enthralling scientific papers I've read, but the unorthodox perspectives embedded within it. The novel viewpoint should not be surprising, given that children are typically not tied down by the same assumptions as adults who have spent decades within scientific institutions. It made me wonder what possible insights and discoveries are lost when only traditional practitioners are conducting science.

In the past year, "citizen science" has gained traction in the media, and big-data projects harnessing human data-processing capabilities are popping up all over the place. Although these projects are a major step towards making science more accessible to those outside academic or institutional settings, they limit citizens to the roles of data collector or processor. What we need is more informal or "amateur" scientists asking the questions, designing the studies and interpreting the answers. 

Every year the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair features scientific research conducted by teenagers. In 2012, Jack Andraka won the fair's grand prize for his discovery of an elegant and inexpensive method for the early detection of cancer. But Andraka had to overcome several obstacles to do so. First, as a high-school student with no formal institutional ties, he was unable to read any scientific literature locked behind paywalls. And even after he'd formulated his hypothesis, 199 researchers turned him down when he asked if he could work with them to test it.

Barriers that inhibit scientists doing research outside traditional settings need to be broken. Everyone should have access to the knowledge gathered from scientific research. More and more scientists are choosing to publish their work in journals that do not require readers to pay excessive fees or to be members of institutions that do so on their behalf. Many scientists bypass this barrier altogether and share their work freely outside journals. Some go further and share their data, experiments and analysis methods. Openly sharing science not only allows nontraditional scientists access to the same resources as those tied to institutions, but also provides the transparency needed to conduct replications, detect potential errors and move the field forward.

However, the infrastructure to conduct science outside traditional institutional settings has far to go. At times, getting approval to do your research takes longer than the rest of the process combined. David Lang, cofounder of OpenROV, recently wrote about the obstacles he encountered when trying to bring a group of amateur ocean explorers to the Gulf of California. Even after the group had overcome one frequent obstacle facing amateur scientists -- building low-cost tools to conduct the research (in this case, underwater robots) -- they were unable to obtain the permits to collect samples because they were not connected to an institution. Undoubtedly, the regulations and ethical checks imposed by research institutions are necessary to ensure no damage is done to the planet or the creatures that inhabit it, but perhaps they can become unbound from traditional institutional settings.

Conducting scientific research does not require the ability to flourish in an academic or institutional environment. Nor does it require years of specialised training. Yet many barriers exist to those who do not possess scientific qualifications. We need to accommodate those conducting research outside "official" settings. This means creating the necessary infrastructure and pushing ourselves to go beyond typical examples of citizen science, where the citizens act as data processors, to include nontraditional scientists in other aspects of the scientific process such as experimental design and data interpretation. This will bring much needed diversity into science, from which we will all benefit.

Kathryn Mills is a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL


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