Thank you kindly for the welcome. I am in the process of reviewing the many projects here as I type. Fossils would be Paleontology but that also interests me. I am a jack leg researcher. Interested in many things but a master of well, very few. ;o)

Don't blame the site. Other sites have similar or worse problems. They seem to have all been designed by the same tech-master.

It's in arXiv, "Accepted for publication in the Journal of Science Communication", Masters+ (2016); here's the abstract:

We investigate the development of scientific content knowledge of volunteers participating in online citizen science projects in the Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org), including the astronomy projects Galaxy Zoo (www.galaxyzoo.org) and Planet Hunters (www.planethunters.org). We use econometric methods to test how measures of project participation relate to success in a science quiz, controlling for factors known to correlate with scientific knowledge. Citizen scientists believe they are learning about both the content and processes of science through their participation. Won't don't directly test the latter, but we find evidence to support the former - that more actively engaged participants perform better in a project-specific science knowledge quiz, even after controlling for their general science knowledge. We interpret this as evidence of learning of science content inspired by participation in online citizen science.

It's a very interesting paper!

"Submitted on 22 Jan 2016" - I feel kinda funny that it hasn't been mentioned here (until now), or in the Z blog, or Daily Z, or Z Twitter; maybe it's on the Z Facebook page?

The full quote is:

This reveals that the higher ranked projects in public engagement success are found to have a stronger association between active engagement and project specific science knowledge

And it comes from Masters+ (2016), "Science Learning via Participation in Online Citizen Science", p18; there's a thread on the paper in ZT, here.

To fully understand this, you need to read the whole paper, but I think it has, potentially, huge implications for the education role/objective of the Zooniverse, including Zoo Teach.

What it says, crudely, is that the more "engaged" (see below) the Science Teams (and zooites) in a Zooniverse project are, the higher the level of participation by zooites in the project (e.g. number of clicks), and the greater their acquisition of scientific knowledge (at least that specific to the project).

The former (the level of participation by zooites in the project) is, obviously, of direct importance to the Science Teams; it implies that the more involved they are, the quicker a project will reach its goals, and (potentially) the better the 'click data' will be.

The latter (the greater the acquisition of scientific knowledge, by participating zooites) is more pertinent to Zoo Teach and Zooniverse Education Team members. It suggests (but only suggests), for example, that the greater the involvement of Science Team members in a project, the better the educational outcome of using such a project in the classroom.

What is "public engagement success"?

Here's the relevant definition, from the paper:

The public engagement success of Zooniverse projects was measured in Cox et al. (2015) by a combination of six factors. Of these, two are measures of project activity on blogs, Twitter and Talk (by both volunteers and the science team), while the others are measures of direct collaboration between professional and citizen scientists, the overall size of the project, and the amount of time/classifications volunteers contribute.

Cox+ (2015) is ""How is success defined and measured in online citizen science? A case study of Zooniverse projects”, Computing in Science and Engineering (in press)", so it's not available for any ordinary zooite to read, yet.

Anyway, what do you think?

If you have a chance, I do recommend that you read the paper, JohnF, especially as it seems your interview may have been part of the research (while I have been interviewed for some VOLCROWE research, from the description of the survey instrument in the paper it is highly unlikely it was for this work).

Per MvGulik's post (here in ZT), a key paper Masters+ (2016) refers to ("Cox+ (2015)", even though it is surely Cox+ (2016)) has apparently just been published; here's a link to the PDF (it's available from a VOLCROWE site, not arXiv, or IEEE*). Should also be a great read.

*The footer on p1 is odd; why would it be copyright IEEE?:

“How is success defined and measured in online citizen science? A case study of Zooniverse projects", ©2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.

OK, I did a bit more digging, and found this in IEEExplore (link), behind a paywall.

There are three dates given, "Date of Publication" (13 May 2015), "Date of Current Version", (23 June 2015), and "Issue Date" (July-Aug. 2015).

This is most strange ... Masters+ (2016) refers to Cox+ (2015) as "Computing in Science and Engineering (in press)"! How can this be? Masters+ (2016) appeared in arXiv, as a preprint, dated 22 January 2016, with this in the comments "Accepted for publication in the Journal of Science Communication"

Earlier, I wrote:

I feel kinda funny that it hasn't been mentioned here (until now), or in the Z blog, or Daily Z, or Z Twitter; maybe it's on the Z Facebook page?

As it turns out, Cox+ (2015) was published ~six months' ago ... so why hasn't it been mentioned here (until now)?

In the UK we're really supposed to be posting to the arxiv the post acceptance version of the text. This is what we claim as Green Open access. Jean - if you find GZ papers which aren't living up to this, I do really want to know about it, so we can get that fixed.

I also think it's a great idea to post links both to the journal and the arxiv/open access version of the paper where we can on the publications page. Hopefully the dev team will find some time to add a field to that soon.

I will get to a blog post about my VOLCROWE science learning paper as soon as I can! You guys have more time for reading our papers than we do for writing about them it seems!

FYI, we didn't use the interview research, only a survey (which went out via the web interface). Anita Greenhill is leading a paper on the outcome of the interviews.

Yes, I do know that. Which is why I was so surprised to find it paywalled. Doubly so as it's a 2011 paper!

The layout of the Zooniverse Publications page is different from what it was; no surprise, it's now in the v3 (or v2?) Zooniverse. And I did not recall seeing Clery (2011) in the old one. Nor that there are now 48 GZ publications.

So I got to wondering if there are any others, behind paywalls?

Thus far I've checked the GZ papers ... and found four more paywalled. Especially surprising is that all four are in MNRAS, which IIRC Karen Masters said had explicitly agreed to make all GZ-based papers free-access! Something seems to have gone wrong ...

Here are the four:

• Melvin+ (2014)
• Casteels+ (2013)
• Tojiero+ (2013)
• Simmons+ (2012) - the year is incorrect (it's 2013)

Funny thing is that I can distinctly recall reading three of these four, in their MNRAS versions (i.e. not the arXiv version)!

I'll go through through the rest of the Space ones later, as well as the Meta Studies.