Citizen science is scientific research that is conducted by ordinary people. They can carry out the research partly or entirely. Citizen scientists can, for example, collect, classify or analyse data needed for a study.
Citizen scientists are not the subjects of the research but the authors of it. They don't need to be trained scientists. The research must usually be led by a trained researcher.
Citizen science can also be referred to as community science, crowd-sourced science or volunteer monitoring.
Source: Recommendation for citizen science
An example of citizen science is species observation websites (in Finnish) maintained by Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility.
When you're searching information on citizen science (books, articles, websites), you could use, for example, the following search words:
Watch the video and learn what citizen science means.
In Finland, open science is coordinated by Federation of Finnish Learned Societies with funding from Ministry of Education and Culture. Citizen science is an important part of open science.