"Ethical issues in Citizen Science": Output Paper of the StepChange Mutual Learning Exercise

The Step Change consortium presented and discussed (together with external experts Sonja Bjelobaba representing BRIDGE project and Dorothea Sturn and Stefanie Schürz representing ProEthics) the key takeaways from the work on its “Citizen Science Initiatives” (CSIs) in regard to the “Ethical issues” during the project activities. Several major lessons learnt in relation to the widely challenges are listed below, along with some experiences, tested solutions and results:

1.    Identification of relevant ethical issues
2.    Assigning appropriate importance
3.    Ethics take time and decisions might interfere with plans
4.    The target group in itself is “sensitive”
5.    Ethics is a point of view
6.    Research integrity and data management

In addition to the CSIs' exchange of experiences and mutual learning from this exercise, we also want others to be able to benefit from our findings.
The output paper was prepared by the ZSI team (Carmen Siller, ilse Marschalek, Elke Dall, Elisabeth Unterfrauner) with inputs from all consortium partners.