Mark2Cure’s 3rd anniversary is coming up, and we are extremely grateful for the opportunity to have interacted and learned from you over the last few years! You make this project interesting. You make this project interesting and exciting. You make this project educational and humbling. You make this project useful and valuable. Although our research team has shrunk two half of what it was when we first started, we have been able to continue to move forward only because of you! We cannot thank you enough!
As a citizen science effort, Mark2Cure is primarily driven by volunteers–and volunteers like you have brought us to where we are today. As of today, we have over 1.3 million annotations!!! We are currently busy with the analysis, so please accept my apologies for being a bit more slow to respond to your inquiries. Fortunately, you and your fellow volunteers continue to help us move forward. In fact, we are excited to share a new preprint on aligning citizen science opportunities with the needs of students fulfilling community service and service learning requirements. The research on these requirements was primarily performed by a volunteer with a marketing/business background and was inspired by a few high school Mark2Curators who have been kind enough to share their experience and needs as students and volunteers.
You can find the preprint on bioarxiv here, and it has been submitted for peer review in the journal Citizen Science Theory and Practice.
A designer has also wrapped up her work on making Mark2Cure more intuitive and user-friendly. A huge thanks to those of you who took the time to provide feedback on individual parts of her designs–although your feedback may not necessarily be incorporated in them here, we will definitely take your detailed and valuable suggestions into consideration.
Since this is citizen science and your voices are important–I’d like to share the designs with all of you. You can find the wire frames here. Note that the actual wording/content is subject to change (especially since we’ve received detailed content recommendations from some of you), and that the focus is more about the layout of the content. Please feel free to share your opinions about it with us!
For those of you who have joined us in last year’s #MedLitBlitz or this year’s #CitSciMedBlitz, you may be familiar with our friends at Cochrane Crowd. Like Mark2Cure, Cochrane Crowd is a citizen science project where volunteers help inspect biomedical abstracts. Cochrane crowd was also launched in May and are celebrating their anniversary with the #showyourscreen 2 Million annotations challenge. Learn more about the challenge here.