A recent article published by the SIREN team sheds light on what drives people to donate their time to this transcription project. Their main findings: 1) Many volunteers use skills they already have, like fast typing, to help the project. 2) Some volunteers see SIREN as a relaxing activity, something pleasant they do in their spare time. 3) Some are interested in water, science, or Italy, so they feel connected to the project’s purpose. 4) A good number of volunteers are retired and still very active in helping.

Many Zooniverse-themed papers have been published in the pages of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) over the years. A recent article in Astronomy & Geophysics (A&G), the RAS Members magazine, celebrates this connection between the RAS and citizen scientists. The article highlights, in their own words, the views of various authors on how they got involved in their Zooniverse projects; what they enjoy about them; and what they see for the future.

YouTube video by The Zooniverse

In this edition of Who's who in the Zoo, meet Patricia, Community Manager of the Science Scribbler organisation. Who: Patricia Smith, Community Manager Location: The Rosalind Franklin Institute, Harwell Campus, Oxfordshire, UK Zooniverse project: The Science Scribbler organisation (photo credit: Ryan Cowan) What is your research about? As a community manager, I wear a lot of different hats! My formal background is materials science and biomaterials, but I'm now the 'citizen science specialist' in a lot of my day-to-day research.

Citizen Science in Biology is a new book by Wilson Wall and David Morgan which celebrates the contribution that volunteers have made to the advancement of the natural sciences. It charts the historical development of citizen science, from its earliest days with amateur individuals working on their own, to the modern incarnation which often sees large numbers of people cooperating on environmental or health projects.

A peer-reviewed article, Crowdsourcing Star-Formation Research and the Power of Participatory Science, was published as a part of the 2024 Astronomy Prize Awardees Collection in the Springer Astrophysics and Space Science Journal. The article details the Milky Way Project’s contributions to our understanding of star formation and describes how Zooniverse projects have been used to engage different communities, such as seminaries, youth, and interfaith groups, in participatory (“people-powered”) science.

Are you looking for a Zooniverse project in a language other than English? Here is the latest update on what is available, as of 1 October 2025. Many thanks to our amazing volunteers - project translators. Do you want to become a Zooniverse translator? Are you a research team member looking to translate your project? Here is what you need to know…

Join Zooniverse volunteers and astronomy enthusiasts worldwide in celebrating 100 Hours of Astronomy, a global festival of skywatching and science, from 2 October to 5 October, 2025.

A new study in Nature's Scientific Reports shows that citizen scientists can reliably count endangered Galápagos marine iguanas from drone images, offering a fast and cost-effective tool for wildlife monitoring. Figure 1. Drone image from the project “Iguanas from Above”, taken at Cabo Douglas, Fernandina Island, Galápagos, Ecuador. Through the online project “Iguanas from Above”, hosted on the Zooniverse.org platform, over 13,000 volunteers analysed almost 58,000 images collected across seven islands of the archipelago.

Cover photo subject (via Talk). Congratulations are due to the research team behind Angling for Data on Michigan Fishes, who have a new publication out in Nature: Community science helps digitize 78 years of fish and habitat data for thousands of lakes in Michigan, USA. Thanks especially to the 3,000+ Zooniverse volunteers who contributed more than 450,000 classifications to this project between March of 2021 and August of 2023.

Here is the latest list of Zooniverse projects available in languages other than English. Many thanks to our amazing volunteers who contributed.

This post is a follow-up to our January 2024 post, "Zooniverse Receives NEH Grant to Evaluate Transcription Tools," which you can read here. In January 2024, we received a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to allow Zooniverse team members to carry out an evaluative study of the underlying code, functionality, and user interface of our main tools for text transcription and analysis.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a powerful new facility high in the dry Chilean mountains. Today, on 23 June 2025, for the first time, it is releasing images from its Legacy Survey of Space and Ti…