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

In 2018, biologist Jan Vendetti published a paper that described the discovery of five species of non-native snails and slugs in Southern California.

The research would not have been possible without some 1,200 volunteers who uploaded nearly 10,000 photos of gastropods to the slime project.

That's Snails and Slugs living in metropolitan environments on an app called I Naturalist.

So the entire existence of that paper is dependent upon the citizen scientists.

How do you credit those people?

Greg Pauly, her pathology curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

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

requirements largely would exclude non-professional scientists and to me that's

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

must change to recognize citizen scientists as authors on scientific journal articles. They propose what they're calling group co-author ship.

They make the case in the journal, trends in ecology and evolution.

The author list on Vendetti's snail and slug paper includes the phrase Citizen Science

Participants in Slim. But that phrase is absent when you look up the paper on Google Scholar.

The publication software simply isn't equipped to handle that kind of authorship, and so it erases

the group's vital contribution.

In another case, several years ago in Australia, a team of researchers tried to condition

native monitor lizards to avoid chowing down on the invasive and poisonous cane toads.

And for the most part, it worked.

...