Forum:Crowdsourcing/Volunteer Bioinformatics - How to recognise volunteer effort and manage reliability of data

Question

[matiu]

I help run a non-profit which will be generating considerable genomic data from WGS of a range of previously unsequenced species. We are interested in crowdsourcing the considerable bioinformatics work required to assemble and annotate the resulting genomes. Does anyone have any experience with this approach? Of particular interest is whether anyone has come across established procedures for training volunteers, ensuring data integrity and recognizing volunteers properly in publications. For example, what is the threshold for a volunteer being included as an author in a publication? Is there any convention at all?

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

There are well established rules for paper authorship, these apply regardless of whether the person has been paid or not. See for example Yale university's guidelines or the ICJME recommendations. Particularly important, I think, is accountability. If I contributed something to your paper and messed up, I can only be held responsible if I am an author.

[matiu]

Thanks Jean-Karim! Appreciate your response.

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

Crowdsourcing was talked about a few years ago but I haven't heard/read anything about it recently. Maybe it has gone out of favour because the experiments were not as successful as anticipated or not worth the effort. See for example this old post. Also this review from Andrew Su. If you don't get feedback here, you could try contacting people from the projects mentioned in the post or in the review.

Answer 1

[h.mon]

I am aware of Dot Chromosome Project, where all students involved became authors. You may like to read CT Brown discussion on authorship here - I think there are other posts on his blog on the subject, but I can't find them.