RRI Explained - Engaging research with Citizen Science

[Music] Hello and welcome to RRI Explained, a REST BIOS podcast. It is the aim of the REST BIOS project to embed responsible research and innovation, or RRI, into four universities across Europe, in the hope of improving the interconnectivity between science research and society, with a particular focus on the biosciences. But what is RRI exactly? Well, hopefully we can find out together. Today we're drawn by Nikola Krojre, who speak to us today more about the Time for CS project, as well as some of the benefits and challenges of using citizen science and how partners work together to implement these initiatives. [Music] Thank you for joining us today, Nikola. I was just wondering if you could briefly give an introduction for the Time for CS project and the work that you do within it. Yeah, thank you for inviting us here to talk about Time for CS. Time for CS is a project, which has a main goal, which is to bring institutional change within the partners of the project, and especially within the so-called implementers, because in the consortium of Time for CS, there are basically two types of institutions. There are front runners, which have a long history and experience in citizen science, like UCL, for example. And then you have implementers that are institutions, research institutions, and universities that have very few experience in citizen science as Universidad de Salud de Sarafale, and more broadly, the Sarafale Research Community, which we tried to get involved exactly by being part of this project. And the goal of the project is essentially to build up an infrastructure within the institution, the implementers, so that the research community will be more able, will have the tools to start doing citizen science. So that means basically to train them, explain what citizen science is, and give all the support both from the point of view of regulations, from the point of view of technical assets in order to make them able to engage citizens in science. So you are one of the implementers for San Rafaeli University. How have you been trying to get the researchers from your institute to involve with the time for CS project and the citizen science projects in general? So actually engaging our research community is one of the most complex part of the project, because Sarafale University and the hospitalis Sarafale do research in a strictly collaborative way. So we have pretty much 100 laboratories that do basic research in many areas, such as oncology, monology, infectious diseases. And then we have the clinic research. So you have this broad spectrum, both in terms of scientific fields, and in terms of type of research, a basic translational and clinical. And it's an area which is biomedicine, where citizen science is even more complex than it is in other scientific fields. And it has come into these fields actually later. One of the problems we have and the project it's all about that in some sense is how to engage our researchers and how to make them willing to do this this activity, which is to engage really citizens and patients in their research activity, which is a challenge for them. So it's not easy. And for this first month, what we have done is to collect information, because we actually don't have all the information about what has already been done in Sarafale in terms of engaging patients and citizens, because we have, we don't have all the information we need. And we discovered by doing a survey that actually many researchers has done things similar to citizen science, but also we discovered that many of them do not know what citizen science is. And the next steps, which actually we already started, is to engage them in events, information, information and also formative events to raise awareness on citizen science, why they should be interested and how they can do citizen science in their specific area of interest, which is a very complex task. So that's quite interesting. You were talking about some of the research is already doing some activities, which are kind of closely connected to citizens science. But perhaps weren't really within the strict framework, whereas some others were more informed about the topic and some were less. I don't know what bit of a two-part question really. So what are the projects so far that the researchers have found that they've been able to kind of integrate into the citizen science framework. And there's been that has there been any, I don't know, friction between the researchers and getting involved with the citizen science programs perhaps. So I think that the main difference between what has already been done and what we want to achieve is that we already have some researchers, mostly clinical researchers, that engage patients and healthy subjects in new ways into their research, making them more active participants. But still, they are not as independent as you will like to have them in a citizen science project because citizen science has this idea that you should. So citizens that can also be patients obviously when we are talking about biomedical research should be involved in the collection of data or in the data analysis in writing the paper that will come out from from their search. Or at the beginning in designing the study their objectives, it's objectives, for example. And we have some experiments in doing this in our institution, but they're very weak forms, I would say, of citizen science. And we would like to give them the tools to do it to do it better. And it's interesting that you say that you want to move beyond patients and participants being just the subject, the people that are being kind of tested on as patients of the medical research, but also becoming greater part of the project as either with data collection or with the project planning. I'm wondering if you could give any more kind of specific examples that you've been doing so far. For example, we, so we discovered that we have a research center works on the use of IT in health, this is one of the example of the broad spectrum of research that is actually carried out in the institution and they did some projects actually European projects and they designed an app to collect data on the diabetes patients and to engage them in deciding the diet. And some of the activities that will help them feel better and be better off another example, we have pancreas surgeons that are working with a new app that is meant to collect data from patients about their equality of their lives of their life. So that they have more information that actually deal with very different kind of activities so that relate to their life like sex life and like what what they eat their diet pretty much everything that it's about their daily life after the intervention so that they can have more information to process and to understand if what they're doing is correct is or can be made better. And this is a, these are just examples and in both cases our searchers use the IT smartphone apps to collect this data and to engage engage subjects so and this is actually a key point of citizen science and because obviously the way you can engage citizens in research is mostly mediated by information technology and now that we have smartphones we have apps. And it's even easier obviously to do that and maybe citizen science also in astronomy or or in other areas such as ecology do that exactly by using smartphone apps. I suppose it kind of makes this seamless. It makes it more seamless kind of as a way of getting people involved and integrated into the research if they just have to use this thing that everyone's got in their pockets download an app and they can be contributing pretty easily to your information gathering. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's very powerful in the biomedical area because it's not very used actually and it is essential because patients have information and knowledge that physicians and biomedical researchers don't have so if you are able to get them involved to get them provide you this information. You will do better research you will improve your tools and treatments faster so I think it's something very powerful that still has to be harness in the proper way. This might be a bit of a rudimental question so I just copy don't mind if it's a we've already mentioned it. I just wanted to clarify. Most of the people that involved in your citizen science projects are they mostly patients because or are they other people from wider society? No, actually most of the projects that we already have or that we're done in the past deals with the patients. But we have a few examples also of projects that are meant to engage citizens at large. We have a huge hospital, which almost 500,000 patients per year. And in the campus, there are supermarkets and shops and many, there's like a small city, I would say very small, but with many different activities. And obviously not only patients move here, but also relatives and people just coming to see patients. And the research center I was mentioning before, the one about the use of IT in health actually carried out some projects in which they were using apps to understand what people were buying inside the supermarkets and what kind of food and stuff they were buying. And to map them to data about health. And they've been doing that because the framework had that. And at the time, I don't think there was, there was smartphones. So it was done here specifically because they have the infrastructure here. Obviously now it's a bit different. But that is an example of a project that actually was collecting data from people moving inside the hospital and these data were used to understand the relationship between diet and health. There are other experiments that would say, but most of them are related to patients. Especially with health science, I suppose, and health care and the research that you do at your institute. Yeah, the interconnection between citizens and health is just a very large overlap there. So I imagine getting kind of citizens involvement and citizen kind of engagement to prove these areas is very important. Yeah, exactly. And I think there is a lot of potential because we have this very translational framework here because we have basic research labs and so the clinical department and everything is connected. And this foster many, many interesting projects. And I think it's the right place also because we have this research center that already worked with IT and we have an omic science center with a lot of my informations. So we have a lot of the skills that are needed to build up a project of this kind, but it's just a potential that is still to be to be honest. So the idea of the project is to provide a time for CS project is to provide the tools and the knowledge to make our research community able to to do a project which is really citizen science. And I think we can do that, but we have to build up everything we need. So you mentioned before that the projects in a relatively early stages just past its year kind of anniversary kind of birthday, I suppose. You've spoken a little bit about the early stages of the project trying to reach out to the researchers and seeing how their work can be involved with the citizen science initiatives and how you can kind of integrate these ideas together. I was just wondering, I don't know, what are the key outcomes so far and what do you hope to achieve in the next year and beyond really? And yeah, your main actions moving forward. Yeah, I think that the first steps were really basic steps. We are entering a citizen science network, the European citizen science network. So this is a simple way to bring in knowledge and tools within the community. We also created a working group of a few of our researchers who already are interested in these topics and have tried to do some of these things I was telling you earlier. So that are already engaged and they are following the projects from a closer position than the wider research community. And we are setting up the first training programs for students and researchers because we also being a university, we also want to make some of the, we want to make part of the university training especially for because we have a faculty of philosophy and psychology, but especially for medicine starting off and then for philosophy also because I think there are interesting overlaps, I would say, or interesting collaboration that can be built between the faculties. But anyhow, we want to train students. So this is a part that has already started. And at the same time, we are setting up informal opportunities for interaction with the researchers. So we are organizing workshops and seminars about citizen science that will start in this next year. So the next year will be for us, the main goal will be to really engage our community. In the next week, actually in this week, we will have the Sanctifirus Suite, which is an event where all the research community of Sarafayla gather together on the lake and share for a couple of days their research. And we will be there also with the project to make it more visible and to engage them. And the other points that are very important is that we will set up an institutional contact point for citizen science. So we will have inside the open science office a person that will be the one supporting researchers who want to use some citizen science approaches in their research. And also, the research policy office is working on the adoption of evaluation criteria for researchers that take into consideration also, this and science. So these are some of the next steps we are taking. Besides this, I think one of the more difficult point of the project, which we actually discussed also during some of the workshop we add with the front runners, is that citizen science is difficult to have a top-down approach and make researchers willing to do citizen science just by forcing on them the idea. And that is because actually it is challenging, it is a new way of doing a research. So it's not part of the project to start off a citizen science research project. We are just creating all the environment that will help researchers to do citizen science. But obviously one of the key points of the projects of the project is to not only educate our researchers and give them the tools to do that, but also spark interest. So this is one of the things that we will work on in the next year, which is to try to make them willing, at least a few of them to make some serious experiment with citizen science. And so one of the points will be to work with some of them and to find a European call, which is proper and try to start off a citizen science project. Because many of the time the problem is that it's in researchers think that it's expensive and just very hard. And there's nothing that comes out of it, which is valuable for them. I don't know, they don't see the value in it, given all the effort that it takes. But we know that that's not true. So one of the key point of the next year will be also to change this way of thinking, I guess. And it's not going to be easy. So I suppose kind of the initial stages of the project were to try and integrate citizen science ideals, maybe an ideal that might not be the right word, but kind of the principles into current research and trying to add that framework there. But then also using these researchers who have then kind of had the experience of it, integrating the sort of mindsets into the current students and future researchers. So they may have these tools at their disposal when they're doing their own research in the future and might possibly integrate these citizen science principles more organically rather than perhaps being strong on. There's a strong word, but just sort of like integrating them kind of after the fact perhaps. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly the idea. Yeah. And one of the one of the things that we think are key is that the researcher is to give their researchers the opportunity to see and to talk to some colleagues from obviously other institutions and research center centers that are doing citizen science are doing it successfully. And that can inspire them, you know, because it's very different if you see someone that works already in the open science area or in RRI and he's pushing to adopt this technique and these approaches because some researchers think that they are driven by the values and the overall objective, but they probably think that it's not a practical way of doing research, not at the time. But we know that this is not true. We know that there are many researchers that are actually, they actually do citizen science, not only because it's it's it's cool and it's great to engage engage citizens and it's a new way of thinking but because it's it's useful because it reduce costs because it allows you to scale up with data collection. So there are there are a number of ways and also because as we said earlier citizens and patients on different topics have knowledge that actually researchers do not have. So one of the key point will be this shift in the mentality that you were talking earlier. We already saw that it will be challenging. You talk a little bit just before about kind of having these mentors and T kind of relationship with researchers currently doing citizen science and then your future students. I was just wondering what the relationship's been like between the front runners and the implementing partners. I imagine you'll come from quite different backgrounds and different institutes have different experiences. I'm just wondering has it been useful kind of co-creating with lots of different facilities and people with different expertise has yeah what's been the benefits of that. It's been great to work with the with the front runners. I think it's it's a very interesting way of learning what to do the idea of the project to really have this mentoring relationship between the front runners and the implementers and it's also challenging sometimes because we are very different institutions both in size in the field in which we do research and also the people involved in citizen science and open science as you said come from very different background like I have a background in science communication. I'm a physicist so I graduated in physics then I study science communication and public engagement. Now I'm working as a public information officer and I have a different set of skills in there that are useful for citizen science then we have colleagues that work on so on open science on RRI on their search integrity for people from the from the publication world so there are very different and obviously researchers themselves especially from the other institutions the so-called champions and citizen science which are very useful and are very important in bringing up change as front runners explain to us. So you have all these different backgrounds and and and way of thinking and and we are working different institutions and countries and we are trying to figure out what are the key ingredients I would say to really bring about institutional change so it's not easy but it's been very very very fascinating and very useful up till now and we are really looking forward to the next steps of the project. No just on a separate note I understand how you feel. I'm a zoologist that then became a science communicator now does kind of digital marketing. It's weird how you get to these places isn't it? Yeah and yeah it is and I want also to say that the other thing that you understand during this workshop and and learning from the front runners is that there's no specific person that have all the knowledge and all the skills to useful for citizen science and I think more broadly about I mean there's no specific there's no title you know to to do this kind of of things and this is true both for citizen science and a rare and open science so you have really different perspective of people coming from very different backgrounds and are all available so I think that in the end what we understood by looking at front runners is that the best way is to have a working group you know a group of people with with different skills that work together to do this kind of things because there's no you know single truth in it so that is even more challenging. I think that's very true because the way our respire works with we do it very similar we have our our mentors and our our mentees but at the latest co-creation mutual working workshop I don't know it became more apparent that even kind of the mentors were learning stuff from the other institutes the mentees and just like it turns out yeah you everyone's learning stuff from each other because everyone's got different backgrounds and experiences and yeah just because the mentors did it's a certain way doesn't mean that they can't learn from new inputs from the mentees and it seems just like yeah there's definitely always this level of co-creation with these sort of projects seems. Yeah also because it's so new I mean citizen science is around a little bit actually the the first projects were probably I don't know 20-30 years ago maybe maybe more it depends on how you define it but anyhow it's still it's still very ongoing and so yeah you're learning why you are doing it and that's true even for the front runners and that somehow is also helpful because it tells you that I mean you can you can do it you know even if you don't have a long experience you will build it up in time. I suppose that leads quite well into my final question I suppose which is now that you've got through a year of being on this citizen science project what are the main challenges and opportunities that have kind of presented themselves throughout and if another EU project or a related project was starting up doing a similar sort of initiative what sort of advice would you give to them? I guess the the main challenge is here is the relationship with the researchers so and the relationship between a top-down and bottom-up approach so you are at the same time trying to have a top-down approach because you are already building the instruments the tools and the offices and and and you're trying to train researchers so they are suggesting what they should do but at the same time you want them to take the lead and this is one of the most tricky part I guess but there's no easy way to do it I mean the opposite way is just to wait till you will be lucky enough that some of these experiments will start in your institution so that you will have some researchers that are championing it this is a very difficult part and I guess that finding a small group of researchers that are already really engaged can make a difference and maybe this is something that you have to do from really the start of the project because the more you make them feel part of it the easier it will be and then they will drive the community so you have also to choose people that are able to do it and this is one of the of the first challenge I would say. The other the other challenge that we saw is that and it's I think it would be true in any other institution that as our work mostly in biomedicine is that when you try to engage citizens regarding health topic there are many ethical issues that you will not find in like astronomy like or or ecology so a citizen science project in which you ask people to gather data or analyze data that are related to health both and especially if your subjects are patients is going to be a challenging from an ethical point of view so you have to engage with all another set of offices and structure within your institution and also different kind of of expertise that you will not have to engage if you were in another field and also for this point I think that it is very important to engage from the start all the actors that are that are needed and this is something that we will we will do and we didn't start off doing obviously it's a process it's an ongoing process but also this is a very challenging point and I think it is specific of biomedicine and biomedical research centers I suppose that's really interesting because yeah when it comes to health and biomedicine there's obviously you it must be hard to do for some research you must be hard to do research for ethical reasons obviously A, B studies and that sort of thing but also when collecting data I suppose there's obviously a degree of aminemity/ kind of confidentiality that comes along with that as well so that's must present some interesting challenges when integrating citizen science into it yeah I think I mean it's it's not it's not an issue that cannot be resolved obviously it's but to be yourself you have to work through it and I think that this is another of the obstacles that keep researchers from this area of science from getting into citizen science because it's more complicated and you have to engage other expertise, other experts, so it's complicate everything but again there's a lot of potential so it's just the point is just to start doing things in a new way and not in the status quo where obviously you don't have these tools so you don't have the there go a lot of framework and everything you have to build up all from scratch I would say so that's that's a challenge. Thank you for joining us today with Nikola. Thank you for inviting us it's been a pleasure to be here. Pleasure to all us thank you very much. The REST BIOS project is funded by the EU with the grant number 872146 to learn more about the REST BIOS project and the other pillars of RRI please go to RESTBIOS.eu thank you for joining us see you next time