Ethical Issues of Scientific Crowdsourcing: Academic Workers Perspective

Abstract

With significant disruption to this educational sector this year, due to COVID-19 pandemic, the need for new delivery methods and greater collaboration has become urgent and obvious as existing structures and traditional channels have struggled to cope or shut down. The literature stresses that science crowdsourcing as one of the types of civic science is an alternative to research projects, a strategy for the organization of researchers' work, and tool for research. Furthermore, science crowdsourcing is a tool for creating online content, for communication between academic teachers and with from outside of the scientific community, for collection of observational data or classification of pictures in response to researcher’s questions, the practice of obtaining participants, services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially via the Internet. It also facilitates the process of collecting, processing, and analyzing research data, attracting participants to surveys, studies, experiments, panels, focus groups, statistical analyses, transcription, generating innovative research questions, hypotheses, research proposals, testing research at an early stage. In addition, it allows to reduce the costs of conducting research, ensuring its financing, establishing cooperation and seeking collaborators for joint research, obtaining evaluation and opinion on the concept of a research project or article, solving problems arising from writing an article or conducting research, determining the reliability and generalization of results and disseminating the results. Despite the high research intensity within this field, science crowdsourcing is still an original and cognitively interesting topic, and plenty of questions remain open. It is stressed that the success of science crowdsourcing depends on its commitment, internal motivation, belief in the potential and effectiveness of science crowdsourcing. The paper discusses the ethical issues of scientific crowdsourcing. A guiding framework drawn from the ethics literature is proposed to guide the ethical use of crowdsourcing.