Citizen Science Award

Forschende und Schülerinnen und Schüler erforschen eine Hecke

Every year in autumn, researchers can submit their project to the Citizen Science Award. As part of the competition, they benefit from many advantages: At workshops they can exchange ideas with projects and teachers. By advertising the OeAD competition through a variety of channels and distribution lists, the projects attract new citizen scientists. The most committed citizen scientists will be honoured at a ceremony for their participation.

The Citizen Science Award has been inspiring citizens throughout Austria for science and research since 2015 and contributing to making scientific processes transparent and tangible. More than 25,400 children, young people and adults have now taken part in 66 research projects. So far citizen scientists have supported researchers with almost 238,000 contributions.

The call for applications for projects for the Citizen Science Award 2025 is closed. School classes, youth groups, families and individuals will be able to contribute to the selected projects in spring and summer 2025.

What benefits does the Citizen Science Award offer to research projects?

The OeAD Center for Citizen Science organises the entire Citizen Science Award on behalf of the BMBWF (see "Citizen Science Award process"). How do researchers benefit?

Capacity building through workshops as well as networking and exchange of experience with other citizen science projects
Extensive promotion of the award and the participating projects and thus reaching more citizen scientists
Personal contact with interested teachers at a teacher training in cooperation with the PH Vienna
Generation of new data and research contributions
Organisation of a festive event for the presentation of the awards
Financial support for cash and non-cash prizes

What do researchers say?

Citizen Science Award process

School classes, individuals and families can participate in the Citizen Science Award every year from April 1 to July 31. But there is also a lot going on before and after the co-research period! Therefore, the entire competition is divided into several phases.