April | 2025 | Zooniverse

As the U.S. Congress deliberates on next year’s budget, proposed 50% cuts to agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the deeply concerning layoffs at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), jeopardize the work of organizations like Zooniverse that rely on federal funding.

Although Zooniverse is an international collaboration, with core institutional partners in both the U.S. and the UK, this post focuses on the vital role that U.S. federal support has played in enabling our impact. As these funding decisions are made, we wanted to share how essential this support has been to Zooniverse’s impact on research and public engagement.

Zooniverse welcomes millions of people into the research process each year, lifting the veil on how science works and building bridges between the public and research. Volunteer efforts on Zooniverse have helped discover planets around distant stars, advance our understanding of wildlife populations, preserve human history, and much more.

From the start, federal grants have been a cornerstone of Zooniverse’s ability to innovate and scale. A seed grant from the NSF in 2009 helped us explore the integration of machine learning with participatory science, work that laid the foundation for Zooniverse to become one of the world’s most sophisticated platforms for AI-enhanced crowdsourced research. A grant from IMLS advanced our Digital Humanities efforts, and a follow-on NEH grant enabled us to build critical infrastructure, like our ALICE system, for reviewing and editing transcriptions across humanities projects. Most recently, support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) enabled a new initiative to render three-dimensional subjects within Zooniverse, expanding the platform’s capabilities to advance biomedical research.

Federal support has also been instrumental in strengthening Zooniverse’s public impacts, from an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grant that led to the creation of classroom.zooniverse.org to an NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) grant that launched a multi-person Galaxy Zoo touch table exhibit at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. This hands-on experience reaches tens of thousands of visitors each year and often serves as the first entry point for children and their families into the world of participatory science.

Crucially, these federal grants don’t just fund abstract ideas or technologies, they fund people. Federal support helps pay the salaries of the software engineers, researchers, and participatory science professionals who build and maintain the Zooniverse platform, collaborate with research teams, and support our community of nearly 3 million volunteers.

Our current NASA grant, for example, enables over two dozen NASA research teams to unlock their datasets through Zooniverse and funds core platform maintenance efforts, an area of support notoriously difficult to secure. Our NASA grant also allowed us to respond directly to community needs through the implementation of new Group Engagement features and student service hours support, among the most requested tools from educators, classrooms, museums, and others using Zooniverse in group settings around the world.

Today, Zooniverse is part of the core infrastructure of research and scholarship. We partner with more than 150 research institutions and nearly 3 million volunteers worldwide. Our platform is a critical tool in the modern researcher’s toolkit, including in fields relying on human-in-the-loop AI methods to analyze vast datasets. At the same time, we are a trusted platform for public engagement, helping build confidence in science and fostering a sense of shared purpose across disciplines, borders, and backgrounds.

Like many research and public engagement organizations, Zooniverse has deeply benefitted from federal grant support. We felt it was important to share with our communities just how vital this support has been. Much of what we’ve built — our infrastructure, partnerships, and public-facing tools — would not have been possible without it. Continued federal investment remains critical to sustaining and growing this work.

We are incredibly grateful to the many individuals who volunteer through Zooniverse to fulfill service hour requirements for graduation, scholarships, and more. This is a fantastic way to meet your requirements while contributing to significant research and discoveries, helping teams worldwide better understand ourselves and the universe.

Below are instructions for participants (students), followed by instructions for Organization Leads supporting students in these efforts.

Instructions for Participants:

Step 1: Share this opportunity with your Organization

Contact your organization to see if participating in Zooniverse can fulfill your volunteering or other participation requirements. A good approach is to share this blog post with your organization so they understand what you will do and how you will document your participation. We strongly recommend checking with your organization before you start to ensure your efforts are recognized.

Step 2: Register at Zooniverse.org

Create a Zooniverse account by clicking ‘Register’ in the upper-right corner of the Zooniverse.org homepage. Only your name and email are captured, and we do not share email addresses outside of Zooniverse.

Note: Registration is not required to participate in Zooniverse, but it is useful in this case to create a volunteer certificate documenting the number of hours you spent classifying and the number of classifications you did. Volunteer certificates are often required documentation for service learning hours.

Step 3: Participate!

Dive into any project and start classifying! There are typically over 80 active projects listed at zooniverse.org/projects. You can filter by different disciplines (history, space, nature, climate, etc.) to find projects that align with your interests. Every project’s ‘classify’ page has a brief tutorial to guide you on what to do and how to do it.

Be sure to be logged in while you participate so that your stats and hours of participation are recorded and can be included in your certificate.

Step 4: Generate your Volunteer Certificate

Go to zooniverse.org, sign in, and click ‘More Stats’. Use the drop-down options on the upper-right of the stats bar cart to filter to a specific time period and/or project of interest. Then click on ‘Generate Volunteer Certificate’ (the button to the bottom-right of your stats bar chart).

Share your Certificate with your Organization. We’d love it if you continue participating!

By following these steps, you can fulfill your service hour requirements while making meaningful contributions to scientific research. Happy classifying!

For details on how hours are calculated, please see notes at the bottom of this post.

Instructions for Organization Leads:

Step 1: Get to know the Zooniverse

When sharing this opportunity with your volunteer community, we recommend emphasizing the benefits volunteers gain beyond just contributing time and classifications. Instead of creating busy work, encourage participants to reflect on how their efforts (and the community’s collective efforts) contribute to our understanding of the world and the broader universe.

Watch this brief introduction and video for more context about the Zooniverse, the world’s largest platform for people-powered research, with dozens of active projects and millions of participants worldwide.

Each Zooniverse project is led by a different research team, covering a wide range of subjects:

Identify planets around distant stars – Planet Hunters TESS
Study the impact of climate change on animals – Snapshot Safari and the ocean – Plankton Portal
Help in understanding biological functions – Science Scribbler
Transcribe handwritten documents – Deciphering Secrets: Unlocking the Manuscripts of Medieval Spain
…and more!

The collective efforts of Zooniverse projects have resulted in hundreds of research publications to date.

Step 2: Share Zooniverse with your Network

Share the instructions above for the simple steps on how to participate and generate a certificate.

If you need to reference a 501(c)(3): Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, one of the hosts of the Zooniverse Team, is a 501(c)(3). Organizations that need to link explicitly to a 501(c)(3) for their volunteering efforts use the Adler Planetarium as the reference. Documentation of the Adler Planetarium’s 501(c)(3) status is provided here. Note: Zooniverse is a program within Adler, Oxford, and the University of Minnesota; it is not a 501(c)3 of its own.

Step 3: Create a Group

If you’re interested in tracking your participants’ engagement, setting group goals, and more easily telling your story of collective impact, check out this blog post for details and instructions.

Step 4: Share your Stories of Impact with Us

We’d love to hear about your experience and share your stories of impact with the broader Zooniverse community to spark ideas and inspiration in others. See this Daily Zooniverse post as an example. Email us at contact@zooniverse.org with your stories, and don’t hesitate to email us if you have any questions or need additional information.

By following these steps, you can include Zooniverse in your volunteer opportunities and help your participants fulfill their service hour requirements while making meaningful contributions to scientific research. Thank you for including Zooniverse in your offerings!

How we calculate ‘Hours’ within Zooniverse Stats:

The hours displayed in the personal stats page are calculated based on the start and end times of your classification efforts. Hours posted there do not reflect time spent on Talk. Talk-based effort is deeply valued and important for Zooniverse projects – it’s where community is built and where many critical discoveries across the disciplines have been made. But within the scope of this phase of developing the new stats and group pages, we only built out views for hours spent classifying.

A little more detail on how the classification time is calculated. Over the years, Zooniverse has updated its infrastructure for robustness and sustainability. In 2015, we built and launched onto our current infrastructure, ‘Panoptes’, and its associated database. At that time in 2015, we started recording both the start and end times for each classification. This means that for all classifications 2015 and beyond, the calculation for time spent on each classification is a straightforward subtraction: finished_at – started_at. We then add up all these values to get the number of hours you’ve spent classifying.

When we made the choice to use the simple ‘finished_at – started_at’ we knew that that could lead to an overestimate of time spent classifying (i.e., you might step away from your computer after starting a classification and then come back to it later). We wanted to keep things as simple as possible and we didn’t want to make assumptions about what someone is doing during the time between ‘finished_at’ and ‘started_at’. We also preferred to err on the side of overestimating rather than underestimating – we’re just so grateful for people’s participation and want to celebrate that.

We do set a 3-hour cap on a single classification to mitigate the impact of ‘stepping away’ on the calculation of your stats. Volunteer tasks on Zooniverse vary widely in complexity—some are quick, like answering yes/no questions, while others, like detailed transcriptions, take more time. Analyzing classification durations across projects, we found that most average between 0–30 minutes, some exceed 30 minutes, with the longest averaging over 3 hours. We ran simulations testing different caps, from 15 minutes to 20 hours, discussed the findings, and decided on a 3-hour cap to fairly credit longer tasks while reducing the impact of idle time.

If you are required to list contact information:

If your program requires that you list contact information for the Zooniverse, please use the following:

Dr. Laura Trouille, Zooniverse Principal Investigator, Adler Planetarium, 1300 South DuSable Lake Shore Dr., Chicago, IL 60605, contact@zooniverse.org

Again, please keep in mind that we unfortunately do not have the capacity to fill out and/or sign individual forms. If your organization is not able to use the automatically generated signed Volunteer Certificate (see notes above), best to find an alternate volunteer opportunity.