What factors explain the capacity and limitations to scale and replicate citizen science projects in Europe?

The dizzying pace of technological advances, the open innovation paradigm, and the ubiquity of high-speed connectivity greatly facilitate access to information, while simultaneously increasing opportunities for greater emancipation and empowerment. In parallel, these facts allow for more and more people to actively participate in scientific research and the shaping of public policies, opening up countless avenues that drive a paradigm shift across all disciplines, including the strengthening of citizen science.

Although the interdisciplinary approach adopted so far in citizen science has yielded significant results and findings, the current situation shows a wide range of projects whose success largely depends on context and where the learnings from the pilots do not go beyond the specific areas of implementation. In summary, there is little evidence on how to foster dissemination and scalability in citizen science. Moreover, the citizen science community currently lacks a general agreement on what these terms mean, what they entail, and how they can be addressed.

To address these issues, we have developed a theoretical and empirical framework to unpack the meaning of scaling and dissemination in citizen science to guide a rich and rigorous qualitative empirical analysis. 

To this end, we conducted a study of four diverse citizen science interventions, all of which were successfully scaled. The data collected through various interviews allowed us to understand and collectively build knowledge about the scalability trajectory of these initiatives based on real experiences and initiatives that successfully undertook the challenges posed.