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See George Hrabovsky's essay "What is the Role of an Amateur Scientist?"

See the current discussion of the proposed SAS Research Journal

21 December 2001

Creating a Culture of Contribution

January 1st is our birthday. That is the date I founded SAS back in 1994. I created this organization with many lofty goals in mind: to build a community of citizen scientists where people of like mind could share their passion for science; to supply the necessary information and, wherever possible, the equipment necessary for them to carry out original research; to help citizen scientists do better and more meaningful research; and to open the gates of the research journals and see many research papers written by citizen scientists published the professional journals. Now eight years later we have accomplished every one of these goals except the last one. While a few of our members have gotten papers published, the number is far too meager for us to be able to say that we are doing much to help to push back the boundaries of science. My approach has clearly not worked, and we need to find a new direction if we are ever going to quicken the pace of discovery.

Many factors have, I think, conspired to make this all true. George Hrabovsky perceptively points out a number of the specifics elsewhere in this issue. But to put it all together, I'm convinced the fundamental reason is a failure of our collective culture as citizen scientists. That's right, we citizen scientists have a culture that is all our own. We define it through what we do and how we act towards each other. And unlike our predecessors, our generation of citizen scientists doesn't expect to make contributions. We don't expect to, so we don't look for opportunities to do original research and even when we do, we do not carry through on the hard work necessary to inject our results into the body of scientific knowledge.

This malaise is relatively new. The trend towards the glittery high-tech and extremely expensive research programs began in World War II. After fifty years, we have grown up in a country that now expects scientific discoveries to come out of well-financed laboratories, and not someone's garage. Moreover, we have accepted this collective judgment and have integrated it into our lives and into our own expectations. We ourselves have built the own activation barrier, and few of us seem to have the energy to get over it.

There can be only one solution. We must change the amateur scientist culture. We must replace it with a culture that expects to contribute to our understanding of the Universe.

This is why I proposed that we create our own research journal, to lower the barrier. I want to build a vehicle for publication that is friendly to amateur scientists, a place without high page costs and the exacting format standards (but, of course, the same scientific standards) of professional journals. I wanted to create a place where citizen scientists could submit their research results and expect them to be published. I don't see it as a replacement for professional journals, but rather as a stepping stone to those journals. (If you have other ideas for how we can stimulate more research papers, please let me know.)

But a research journal can only help the process of change; it can not carry it through. We will never create a culture of contribution until we change our own expectations. We must commit ourselves to following our own scientific interests wherever they take us. We must do the research and then we must begin sharing our results with a wider community.

Let that be your New Year's resolution.

Shawn Carlson