Digital library

The Digital Library of the University of Ljubljana (DiKUL) is a portal for searching and accessing national and international scientific literature available to UL. While the portal is only fully functional for UL members, all others can use the portal to search the literature and access abstracts and other information about the literature. The literature itself is available for guest access on UL premises.

Openscience.si is a portal for searching and accessing open access articles and other literature in the repositories of Slovenian research institutions. Through this portal, you can access the repositories of four Slovenian universities, some major institutes and some Slovenian subject repositories (specialised in a narrower research field).

Open Research Europe (ORE) is a platform for the open publication of scientific articles, including open peer review. It is a different way of publishing compared to articles in peer-reviewed journals. Here, we publish the article on the portal and suggest reviewers. The reviewers then evaluate the article and the author can revise the article until he/she receives a positive evaluation from the reviewers.

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a portal for finding and accessing open and freely available electronic books. It contains over 62,000 scholarly books.

BASE is a database containing information on 300 million documents (scientific articles and others). About 60% of these are open access, so that the full text can be accessed.

CORE is the world’s largest open access aggregator of research articles from repositories and journals. It is a non-profit service dedicated to the mission of open access.

The UK’s first fully open access university press, founded in 2015. It has quickly established itself as a high-quality open access university press. They have published over 240 open access books and also publish 14 open access journals.

Unpaywall is a search engine for open access articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals such as Science or PLOS One, and pre-publication versions of similar works from pre-publication repositories such as arXiv. More specifically, it searches for articles with an identifier called DOI.

PLOS is a not-for-profit, open access publisher that empowers researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by transforming science communication.

An open access journal for citizen science researchers and practitioners, published by Ubiquity Press in the USA, focusing on global advances in citizen science. The journal is dedicated to sharing best practices in the design, development, implementation and maintenance of citizen science projects in any discipline that enable public participation in scientific endeavours.

An interactive collection of different tools that enable different aspects of citizen science research.

The toolkit is designed to help teachers integrate citizen science projects into classroom curricula or extra-curricular programmes. It contains resources – including presentations, literature and worksheets – to help communicate the importance of citizen science to students and to empower and influence them to carry out scientific research.

The survey was carried out as part of a Scotland Counts project to provide guidance to those wishing to involve volunteers in citizen science. This report reviews current participation in citizen science, the wider motivations of volunteers, and offers practical hints and tips for engagement and new channels for recruitment.

The guide is based on detailed information collected and analysed in the framework of the “Understanding Citizen Science and Environmental Monitoring” project in the UK. It helps in planning and implementing a citizen science project related to biodiversity or the environment.

The strategy presents the goals, potentials and challenges of citizen science in Germany and makes recommendations for the development of a national strategy for citizen science.

This publication was produced within the framework of the project Active citizenship in times of (post) covid-19, which is implemented by the Institute for Development and Strategic Analysis within the framework of the Small Grants Programme of the American Embassy in Slovenia. The publication is intended to promote citizen science projects in Slovenia.

The toolkit is aimed at researchers and scientists working in the field of biodiversity or environmental sciences who are involved or interested in involving citizens in their research projects. It informs about the benefits of citizen science and highlights the reasons for carrying out projects. It lists best practices and useful resources in this field.

The guide describes the principles of citizen science in Germany and how this participatory approach can be applied in different scientific fields. It is intended for those planning citizen science projects as well as for all those involved in such projects.

Part of the Scotland Counts project, analysing the role and potential of social networks in citizen science projects.

The guide aims to improve knowledge and awareness of citizen science and the environment and to encourage greater participation in biological monitoring. It was developed for the “What’s Happening?” project, which aims to increase wildlife recording in mountain areas.

Part of the Scotland Counts project, which analyses the reasons and motivations of citizen researchers for engaging in research.

A guide for implementing citizen science projects from the professional association LIBER. The aim is to make available the open infrastructures and open science knowledge and experience that libraries offer for citizen science projects. The guide, the first of four, is designed as a practical toolkit for managing citizen science projects.

The aim of the publication is to inspire researchers and the library community to take a second look at the infrastructures around them and how they can be creatively applied to citizen science projects. Open science has already expanded the array of tools and practices used in research infrastructure. The challenge is how to take these one step further for citizen science, in areas such as — expanding acknowledgement of contributor roles, in collecting data, or providing pathways for the use of open access by the public.

The guide covers questions of how to implement open science practices in general in your citizen science project, the ethical considerations for data and citizen’s personal data as is now commonplace from health and fitness wearable devices, an in-depth exploration of the area of open hardware for instruments to use in citizen projects, and a look how the Wikimedia Foundation platforms and programmes intersects with citizen science.

The SciStarter Tools database is a searchable list of various tools and instruments (e.g. telescopes, microscopes, GPS modules, etc.) that you can either buy or build yourself.

An international search engine for citizen science projects, run by North Carolina State University and Arizona State University in the USA. It also contains many on-line projects that can be accessed from anywhere.

A tool that allows you to create dedicated maps and integrate them into different projects and presentations.

An open source geographic information system (GIS) that allows you to import and export raster and vector cartographic and geospatial material and work in layers. QGIS is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and mobile devices.

Google Earth is a 3-dimensional viewer of satellite images of the Earth’s surface. It allows you to view the Earth from any height at any angle. Some locations (e.g. cities) have been specially processed so that vector models of buildings are also visible in the 3D view.

Worldview is a mapping tool for viewing different types of satellite maps and imagery. Satellite imagery is available showing floods, fires, light pollution, sandstorms, weather events (e.g. hurricane development), land use and much more.

The Jupyter project is a non-profit, open source project that emerged from the IPython project. It contains tools and software libraries that enable the use of interactive work with scientific data and computing in science. The tools and code are compatible with all programming languages.

GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers (programmers) to store and manage software code, with an emphasis on tracking and controlling different versions of the code. This way, multiple developers can work on the same project without writing over each other. This way of working is also useful for managing other types of data that take the form of different versions.

Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for distributed or crowdsourced research, made possible by more than one million volunteers worldwide who help professional researchers by reviewing and analysing research data that modern computers cannot yet analyse well enough (pattern recognition, thinking “out of context”, etc.). This enables research that would not otherwise be possible.

CitSci is a catalogue of citizen science projects edited by Colorado State University. In addition to the catalogue, tools (mobile apps, APIs, etc.) and advice and support for citizen science implementation are available.

The Citizen Science Center Zurich offers a set of tools to make it easier for scientists and individuals to collaborate on citizen science projects. The portal offers a mobile app for data collection, instructions for project creation and a small catalogue of projects.

EU-Citizen.Science offers a wide range of free training modules on citizen science. The topics of the training modules range from an introduction to citizen science, through research design and methods, engagement and impact, to communication, regulation and ethics.

SciStarter offers free online courses on citizen science, developed by experts from Arizona State University and SciStarter. The modules include training on data literacy, the role of libraries and colleges in citizen science, and ethics in working with data.

An online course to learn how to build your own citizen science project, how to collect and analyse data on pressing environmental issues, and how citizen science can contribute to solving global environmental challenges.

This online course covers the theory and practice of citizen science and distributed or crowdsourcing research. During the course you will learn about the history and theoretical foundations of citizen science, as well as the practical aspects of creating and managing a citizen science project.