SCIENCEUS – ECSA 2026 Panel P01
From Margins to Metadata
At the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) 2026 Conference in Oulu, Finland—European Capital of Culture 2026—this panel opened an important conversation on how inclusive information management can help make citizen science more equitable. The conference theme, “Citizen Science bridging Centre and Periphery,” provided the perfect backdrop for our exploration of how standardised scientific metadata can sometimes sit in tension with the rich, diverse forms of community knowledge emerging from peripheral regions—from rural mountain communities to urban margins, from coastal areas to energy-vulnerable neighbourhoods. The session presented practical experiences from five citizen science projects testing Open Science principles in real time, demonstrating how data ethics, participatory archiving, and community-owned governance can bridge the gap between marginalised voices and mainstream scientific and policy systems. Held on 05/03/2026 as an in-person session at the University of Oulu, Finland, the panel was led by Fabien Borget and Aline Baas (Aix-Marseille University), with participation from the panel’s participants.
What was the goal?
The session aimed to answer whether Open Science data management could become the default principle for participatory science projects—not through theory alone, but through concrete experience from the ScienceUs project, where we’re testing these principles across five diverse citizen science initiatives.
Key Topics
Within the ECSA 2026 context of “Centre vs. Periphery,” the discussion strongly resonated with the realities of our five projects: Acqua Sorgente’s mountain communities in Italy, CoRe-ACTS’s coastal villages in Ireland, Blue-Green Tops’ urban rooftops in Greece and Turkey, ENERPOV-CRE’s vulnerable households in Spain, and Future is Climate’s youth communities across 27 EU countries.
A central focus was the tension between standardisation and local knowledge, exploring how rigid metadata schemas can erase valuable community context, while overly unstructured data may become difficult to use for research and policy—an especially important challenge when connecting urban centres with peripheral regions. The panel also highlighted FAIR as a guiding framework for making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, while introducing 15 recommendations for participatory data management drawn from the French national report Participatory Research and Data (Maussang et al., 2023), structured around five phases: Design, Trust, Training, Quality, and Tools & Law. In addition, participants examined the need for a dedicated Data Management Plan template for citizen science, showing how standard Horizon Europe DMPs often fail to address the realities of participatory projects, and how an adapted template can better cover participant-contributed data, quality control, ownership, and community management budgets. Finally, the session addressed real-world tensions and practical strategies for balancing standardisation with local context, open data with privacy, and scientific rigour with storytelling—offering lessons directly relevant to bridging centre and periphery.
Highlights & Insights
The most valuable discussion point emerged from the panel’s core question: “Could Open Science data management become the default principle for participatory science projects ?“ Set in Oulu—a city that embodies the centre-periphery dynamic as a northern European hub connecting to both Arctic and continental Europe—this question took on special resonance. Our experience with ScienceUs suggests yes—but only if we deliberately design for difference rather than uniformity.
We shared how the five projects are testing flexible approaches. A key challenge identified was adapting standard DMP templates. The Horizon Europe template simply doesn’t ask the right questions for participatory science. It asks “What data will be generated?” but not “What data will participants collect, and how will you guide them?” It asks “How will data quality be ensured?” but not “How will you control participant contributions both before and after submission?” This gap—between centre-defined templates and periphery-grounded practice—led us to develop our own template, now freely available for the community.
The Oulu setting sparked rich discussion about what “periphery” means in different European contexts. For our Italian project Acqua Sorgente, it’s mountain communities; for the Irish CoRE-ACTS, it’s coastal erosion hotspots; for the Greek-Turkish collaboration Blue-Green Tops, it’s urban neighbourhoods on the geographical margins of Europe; for the Spanish Future is Climate & Energy Poverty, it’s households excluded from energy transitions. Each periphery produces knowledge that mainstream systems struggle to capture.
Tools & Methods
The session also introduced several practical resources to support participatory data management in citizen science. These included our adapted Citizen Science Data Management Plan template, based on the Horizon Europe model but enhanced with questions specifically tailored to participatory research, and made freely available for adaptation and reuse. Another key resource was the 15 Recommendations framework from Maussang et al. (2023), Participatory Research and Data, which offers a practical roadmap structured around five phases: Design, Trust, Training, Quality, and Tools & Law. In addition, the panel highlighted ways of integrating FAIR principles through practical examples that combine technical standards with ethical governance.
What’s Next?
The ScienceUs projects will continue testing these approaches throughout their FLOURISH phase, with findings feeding into the HARVEST phase where they’ll connect with policymakers, industry, and academia through our Quadruple Helix test-bed. We invite the citizen science community to use, adapt, and improve our DMP template—because the more we share tools and practices, the more citizen science becomes equitable by default.
“Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.”