Zooniverse: 10 years of people-powered research

The citizen science platform, Zooniverse, is 10 years old; it boasts a community of over 1.9 million volunteers and has supported 229 citizen science projects. Over the last decade volunteers on Zooniverse projects have performed a wide range of tasks, including classifying over 1.7 million galaxies, transcribing a quarter of a million pages of text, and they even watched 74,016 videos of nematode worms! Their amazing effort has led to the production of over 200 research publications. The Zooniverse was launched on 12th December 2009 following the success of an initial 2-year project, Galaxy Zoo, that harnessed people power to classify a million galaxies. Initially featuring a small collection of astronomy projects, and one involving the transcription of old ship's weather logs, it quickly started attracting projects from other disciplines. Zooniverse offers a unique resource for researchers, allowing them to engage volunteers worldwide who want to collaborate and help with their big data problems - like counting penguins in millions of pictures from Antarctica, or transcribing text written on ancient scrolls. Zooniverse founder, University of Oxford astrophysicist and co-presenter of BBC's The Sky at Night, Professor Chris Lintot t, said: 'Zooniverse was one of the first initiatives to realise the potential of people-powered research on such a large scale. Our volunteers want to play their part in today's scientific discoveries and help to change the world they live in.