Conceptual Framework for Analytics Tools D1.2

Building upon Deliverable D1.1, Deliverable D1.2 goes beyond the report in several respects. Firstly, it presents a mapping of citizen science landscapes in the European Union and beyond, of funding programmes, policies, advocacy and working groups, and opportunities for participating in citizen science activities. Resulting from desktop research and expert interviews, this mapping also presents findings on geographic areas such as Russia that are usually not in focus when talking about citizen science. Since the issue of political contexts was not addressed in Deliverable D1.1, it is addressed in this report in an exemplary way. Secondly, interviews with African, Asian, European and US-American experts on Open Science, research ethics and research integrity supplement the literature review for Deliverable D1.1 and allow to get a clearer picture of potential policy options here. Thirdly, this report presents an overview of educational citizen science activities in schools that complements the literature review on citizen science activities in education.

Chapter 2 of this report presents the methodologies for this report. Altogether, the research for Deliverable D1.2 consisted of literature analysis, web searches, and expert interviews. Chapter 3 presents analyses of citizen science landscapes in selected geographic areas. These analyses are based on a structured web information retrieval that is described in the methodology chapter. For some geographic areas either no information on citizen science in these areas could be found or there is no command of the official languages of these areas in the consortium. Consequently, the authors conducted interviews with experts on Open Science and citizen science in these geographic areas. Based on expert interviews, chapter 4 of this report discusses policy contexts of citizen science activities and issues of research ethics and research integrity of such activities. Chapter 5 gives the overview on citizen science-related educational activities in schools in Europe. Chapter 6 and 7 describe methodologies for Work Package 2, 3 and 4. Chapter 6 presents the binding force of the research methodologies in Work Package 2, 3 and 4: how they are related to each other, what methodologies are applied in these work packages, and, finally, how these methodologies have been revised when conducting the project. Chapter 8 of Deliverable D1.1 presented the role and context of computational analytics in CS Track and the methods to be applied for the analytics techniques to be performed in Work Package 3. Complementary to this description, Deliverable 3.1 presented the processing techniques Work Package 3 draws on and the different levels of analysis. In chapter 7 of this report these levels are further exemplified, furthermore, computational representations, methods of analytics and the operationalisation of indicators are described: the conceptual model underlying the structure of the database from which data are retrieved for web analytics in Work Package 3, attribution, the extraction of data, and the operationalisation of indicators.

The report closes with notes on contributions (chapter 8), a bibliography (chapter 9) and an annex with the interview guidelines and handouts for the expert interviews.