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Science Quickly

Citizen Scientists Deserve Journal Status Upgrade

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2019

⏱️ 4 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Here’s an argument that citizen scientists deserve co-authorship on scientific journal papers to which they contributed research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

0:22.7

.jp.j. That's y-A-K-U-Lt.c-O.jp. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:33.5

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

0:39.4

In 2018, biologist Jan Vendetti published a paper that described the discovery of five

0:45.7

species of non-native snails and slugs in Southern California. The research would not have

0:51.5

been possible without some 1,200 volunteers who uploaded nearly

0:55.5

10,000 photos of gastropods to the slime project.

0:59.4

That's snails and slugs living in metropolitan environments on an app called I Naturalist.

1:05.4

So the entire existence of that paper is dependent upon the citizen scientists, how do you credit those people?

1:13.4

Greg Polly, herpetology curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

1:18.5

There's some very specific requirements that a lot of journals and a lot of academic societies use,

1:23.6

and those requirements largely would exclude non-professional scientists.

1:28.9

And to me, that's absurd.

1:30.6

That's why Polly, together with Vendetti and several Australian biologists, are arguing that

1:35.9

criteria must change to recognize citizen scientists as authors on scientific journal articles.

1:42.3

They propose what they're calling group co-authorship.

1:46.3

They make the case in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The author list on Vendetti's

1:52.2

snail and slug paper includes the phrase, citizen science participants in slime. But that phrase is

1:59.0

absent when you look up the paper on Google Scholar. The publication

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