The future of science... Will it go big or citizen?

The rise of the citizen journalist has been written about plenty and has changed the journalism industry in recent years. Aaron E. Hirsh, a guest blogger at the New York Times blog, The Wild Side, writes not about how citizens have changed journalism, but in how citizens are changing science.

Over time, he writes, science has moved towards centralization. research tends to be done in a small number of big projects. This move has been termed Big Science. Biologists sequence genomes by submitting their research to a large sequencing center. Ecologists study the effects of carbon dioxide on trees by working with national labs that may also do particle smashing.

On the other hand, citizen science has also risen in popularity, especially as the internet becomes more sophisticated and widespread. Citizen science enlists many untrained people in the collection of scientific data. One example is the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count:

For me, an especially inspiring example of Citizen Science is the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. Every winter, from mid December to early January, tens of thousands of intrepid hobbyists fan out across North America, and together, they do their best to answer two basic questions: How many birds are there? And what kinds?

It’s a simple sort of data, to be sure, but it is nonetheless scientifically invaluable. The CBC dataset now covers 109 years, and this remarkable temporal extent, along with geographic range that spans the continent, enables scientists to address questions that would otherwise be as inaccessible as a Higgs boson. Just in the past few years, scientists have used the CBC dataset to track the emergence and impact of West Nile virus, to understand the ecological effects of competition between introduced species and to measure the shift that birds make toward the poles in response to global
warming.

Hirsh argues that there is a place in the future for both big science and citizen science. They fulfill different purposes. Obviously, citizen journalism is unable to run a genetic sequencing test, but it is better than big science at noticing global change.

Perhaps journalists antsy about the rise of citizen journalism will also realize that professional journalists and citizen journalists fulfill different purposes and can coexist side by side as well.