The quality criteria for resources
Our ambitious goal is to become the place to share useful resources about
planning and running citizen science initiatives, including tools and guidelines,
best practices and training modules. We hope to make practical citizen science project
guidance findable and accessible to all, and enable people to initiate their own
activities wherever they are. It is therefore very important to us, and the community of
practitioners, that we have a way of ensuring that the resources shared and profiled on the
platform are indeed of good quality, and valuable to the community.
What are citizen science resources? They are resources and practices that could be
used for help and support in the context of citizen science - they can help individuals,
projects or organizations to understand, plan, implement and evaluate citizen science and
citizen science practices, and demonstrate the value of citizen science to different audiences.
Resources can include documents such as how-to guides, publications, reports, policy briefs,
and protocols; technical tools such as software or hardware; other file formats such as videos,
podcasts, and diagrams; and even websites or webpages.
What are good-quality citizen science resources? They are resources that are easy to access,
implement and adapt; well structured; clearly described; written with a clear language and
ideally have an impact (e.g., on science, policy or society, etc.); and therefore useful
to the citizen science community and beyond.
We have developed the following set of required and suggested quality criteria as a way
of ensuring that the resources that you can find on this platform are indeed of good quality.
You can read more about how we developed these in the blog post ‘How we developed the quality
criteria for resources’.
When you are creating a profile for a resource to share on the platform, please ensure that it
meets all of the mandatory criteria, and as many of the suggested criteria as possible.