The two projects coordinated from Ibercivis are working towards a European infrastructure for citizen science: RIECS-Concept has completed the technical feasibility study after 18 months of work with the community, and EOSC-CSN has drawn up a plan, already accepted, to connect it with the European open science cloud.
The shared goal is for citizen science to have a stable place in the European research area, and for the people who take part, whether or not they are institutionally affiliated, to be able to access its resources and services.
RIECS-Concept: a research infrastructure for citizen science
RIECS-Concept, coordinated by Fermín Serrano, is conceptualising a future research infrastructure for excellent citizen science, designed to enter the roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and intended to provide resources and services across different domains.
Citizen science brings its own specificities compared with other research infrastructures: participants act as users of the infrastructure, but also as providers of resources and data, and as actors in its governance. This particularity opens up relevant possibilities, such as citizen science being recognised as a horizontal capacity within the European Research Area (ERA), or facilitating evidence-based decision-making through citizen-generated data that is sovereign, high-quality and trusted. To this end, the project addresses the structural barriers that currently hold back excellence, such as fragmentation, interoperability and sustainability.
After 18 months of work, the consortium has completed a first conceptual draft of what RIECS could look like. The published catalogue is a first technical feasibility study which, together with the strategic plan, will form the core of a future application to the ESFRI roadmap.
Over these 18 months, more than 700 scientific papers have been reviewed and more than 4,400 technologies assessed. 50 engagement activities have been carried out across 10 countries, with online questionnaires reaching around 500 people, and 823 user stories have been collected. From this, 37 needs and 31 technical requirements have been identified, all with human validation and expert oversight through consortium review, interviews, and domain-expert validation.
The project already has orientations on what RIECS should build and operate itself, what it should provide as services, and what it should federate or connect with existing capacities. These orientations will be further refined over the coming months. RIECS-Concept will end in December 2027.
EOSC Citizen Science Node: a citizen science node in the EOSC Federation
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) champions the management and use of research data to ensure the scientific community has access to data-driven science, with continuous access to and reliable reuse of that data. It is organised as a federation connecting nodes from different countries, thematic domains and institutions. EOSC Citizen Science Node (EOSC-CSN), coordinated by Francisco Sanz, is Ibercivis’s proposal to create a citizen science node. The project is also a practical implementation pathway for RIECS and, at the same time, a design foundation and enabler for it.
Its objective is to make the EOSC Federation genuinely accessible and useful to the European citizen science community, both for researchers and for people taking part in citizen science without institutional affiliation. It may also bring new communities, citizen-generated datasets and citizen science capabilities into the Federation, while enabling other EOSC nodes to use citizen science as a research methodology in their own work.
In just three months, the first EOSC-CSN Project Charter has been drawn up, which has just been accepted by EOSC GRAVITY. It sets out two main objectives: enabling trusted access to EOSC services for non-affiliated citizen scientists, through a Community Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (Community AAI), and establishing an interoperable environment that supports the full citizen science project lifecycle, from project creation and data acquisition, through validation and analysis, to publication and contributor attribution. EOSC GRAVITY reviewers have also shared recommendations that will help refine the concept and plan the next implementation steps. The EOSC GRAVITY Cascading Grant for the EOSC-CSN Preparatory Project will end in November 2026.