Zooniverse

Zooniverse

Zooniverse is a platform for people-powered research. It hosts dozens of projects across a range of disciplines, from physics to humanities, where volunteers can contribute to real academic research by classifying images, transcribing text, or identifying features of interest.
Online Services Citizen Science
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crowdsourcing volunteering research
Zooniverse alternatives ➤

Zooniverse: People-Powered Research Platform

A platform for collaborative research across various disciplines, where volunteers contribute to real academic projects through image classification, text transcription, and feature identification.

What is Zooniverse?

Zooniverse is an online citizen science platform that enables volunteers from around the world to contribute to academic research projects. It was launched in 2007 and has grown to become the world's largest and most popular platform for people-powered research.

Zooniverse hosts dozens of projects across a diverse range of disciplines including physics, astronomy, humanities, biology, climate science, medicine, and more. These projects rely on contributions from members of the public to complete simple tasks that computers cannot yet accomplish, such as identifying features in images, classifying galaxies, transcribing historical documents, tracking wildlife, and more.

The data generated from Zooniverse projects helps accelerate academic research and leads to new discoveries. Over 2 million volunteers have made over 100 million classifications across Zooniverse to date. Some notable discoveries enabled by Zooniverse include new black holes, exoplanets, transcriptions of Shakespeare's handwriting, newAnimal behavior insights, and more.

The Zooniverse platform makes it easy for any researcher to create a project. Volunteers can sign up for free, choose projects based on their interests, complete basic tutorials explaining the classification task, then get started contributing. The platform takes care of hosting images and data as well as analyzing volunteer inputs. Results help researchers better understand their subjects and share findings more quickly thanks to public participation.

Zooniverse Features

Features

  1. Crowdsourcing platform to involve public in academic research
  2. Volunteers can classify images, transcribe text, identify features in datasets
  3. Supports dozens of research projects across disciplines like physics, humanities, biology
  4. Flexible framework allows researchers to build customized projects
  5. Integrates machine learning to combine volunteer contributions with algorithmic analysis

Pricing

  • Free

Pros

Democratizes research - allows public to directly contribute

Scales data analysis with crowdsourcing

Engages and educates volunteers

Produces publishable research results

Cons

Relies on continued volunteer engagement

Quality of volunteer contributions can vary

Researchers cede some control compared to traditional methods

Still requires researcher effort to design projects, interpret results

Official Links

Official Website
https://www.zooniverse.org

The Best Zooniverse Alternatives

Top Online Services and Citizen Science and other similar apps like Zooniverse

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