Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A European biodiversity project aligns with the ECSA Ten Principles when designing volunteer protocols.
- Is an instance
An ECSA working group develops a metadata standard for citizen-science datasets.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Claiming ECSA endorsement without participation in or alignment with its principles.
- Not an instance
Treating ECSA only as an outreach forum, ignoring its policy-influence role.
Editorial commentary
ECSA (the European Citizen Science Association) is a European network of citizen-science practitioners, researchers, and project owners that promotes the practice, quality, and recognition of citizen science across Europe and internationally. It was founded in 2014, headquartered at the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin.
The Ten Principles of Citizen Science
ECSA’s best-known output is the Ten Principles of Citizen Science (Robinson et al., 2015), a widely cited framework of best-practice principles for the design, delivery, and evaluation of citizen-science projects. Rather than list each principle’s exact wording here (secondary summaries of it are inconsistent), this entry points administrators to the primary source below before citing a specific principle by number in a grant application or ethics submission.
What ECSA actually does
Beyond the Ten Principles, ECSA organises biennial conferences, runs working groups on data interoperability, ethics, and project development, and partners with counterpart associations internationally, including the Citizen Science Association in the US and the Australian Citizen Science Association. ECSA contributed to European Commission citizen-science policy development and to the 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which explicitly recognises citizen science as a legitimate mode of open scientific knowledge production.
How this differs from citizen science itself
ECSA is a membership association and standards body, not a synonym for citizen science as a research method, and not the only such body — national and regional citizen-science associations exist alongside it. Citing “ECSA” as though it certifies or accredits a specific project overstates its role: ECSA sets voluntary shared standards; it does not audit or certify individual projects against them.
What this means for research administration
Align citizen-science project design with the ECSA Ten Principles by consulting the primary document directly rather than a paraphrase, and credit ECSA (and, where relevant, a national citizen-science association) as a standards reference in a methods or ethics section rather than as an endorsing body.
References
- ECSA, ecsa.citizen-science.net.
- Robinson L et al., ‘Ten Principles of Citizen Science’, ECSA, 2015.
Provenance of the Ten Principles
The Ten Principles of Citizen Science were developed in 2015 by ECSA’s working group on sharing best practice and building capacity, and published as a best-practice guideline on what constitutes good citizen science. ECSA has since coordinated translations of the principles into a wide range of languages, which is part of why the document is cited well beyond Europe. ECSA itself is based at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin.
Where to read them: the authoritative text is published by ECSA at ecsa.ngo. Note that the older ecsa.science domain no longer resolves, so citations pointing there will fail — checked and confirmed 2026-08-23. This entry deliberately does not reproduce the ten principles as a numbered list, because the wording matters and the canonical version should be read from ECSA rather than paraphrased second-hand.
Also known as
ECSA
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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