An Ethics Framework for Evaluating Ownership Practices in Biomedical Citizen Science
Open accessAbstract
The collaborative nature of citizen science raises important questions about managing ownership of its research outputs. Potential citizen science research outputs include data sets, findings, publications, and discoveries of new ideas, methods, products, and technologies. Unlike citizen science projects conducted in other disciplines, biomedical citizen science projects often include features, such as contribution of personal health data, that might heighten citizen scientists' expectations that they will be able to access, control, or share in the benefits of project outputs. Here, we refer to moral claims of access, control, and benefit as ownership claims, and a project's management of ownership claims as its ownership practices. Ethical management of ownership is widely recognized as an important consideration for citizen science projects, and practitioners and scholars have described helpful recommendations for preempting issues and engaging stakeholders on practices. Building on this literature, we propose a framework to help biomedical citizen science projects systematically evaluate the ethical soundness of their ownership practices based on four considerations: reciprocal treatment, relative treatment, risk-benefit assessment, and reasonable expectations.
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Some volunteers welcome open, public-good data policies, while others want recognition or even some control over how their recordings are used downstream.
“Some welcome open, public-good data policies, while others want recognition or even some control over how their recordings are used downstream (Guerrini and McGuire 2022).”
From Listening forward: emerging roles of bioacoustics in ecology, evolution, and conservation (2026) · cites this paper as Guerrini and McGuire 2022
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- Authors
- Guerrini, C. J., & McGuire, A. L.
- Affiliations
- Baylor College of Medicine (US)
- Corresponding author
- Guerrini, Christi J.
- Venue
- Citizen Science: Theory and Practice
- Publisher
- Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
- Published
- 2022
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 2057-4991 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC10237586
- OpenAlex
- W4312326319
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 48
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 2
- FWCI
- 1.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Citizen Science Theory and Practice (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- Citizen Science: Theory and Practice (Citizen Science Association) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- National Human Genome Research Institute (K01 HG009355)
- National Institutes of Health (K01 HG009355)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Ethics in Clinical Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Research Data Management Practices
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Ethics and bioethics in healthcare
- Keywords
- ownership claims, ethics framework, personal health data, benefit sharing, risk-benefit assessment, reasonable expectations, stakeholder engagement
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