# What is "Citizen's Science" ? Legally speaking

**URL:** <https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-citizens-science-legally-speaking/19736>\
**Category:** Nature Talk\
**Created:** [January 26, 2021, 6:24pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-citizens-science-legally-speaking/19736 "2021-01-26T18:24:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 5

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**Author:** ![pisum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/91b2a8/32.png) [@pisum](https://forum.inaturalist.org/u/pisum)\
**Post date:** [January 27, 2021, 1:22am UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-citizens-science-legally-speaking/19736/5 "2021-01-27T01:22:37Z")

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> [@ram\_k](#):
>
> While they invite contributions from the “public” their licensing is like a typical Authorship reference

i think you might be confusing a licensing / copyright statement with a citation. these are different things. the statement you’ve quoted in your post above is a suggested citation, and looks to me like a legitimate way to cite a particular collection of observations (maybe except the “Anonymous” part). (we discussed something similar in [Looking for advice on how to cite a project - General - iNaturalist Community Forum](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/looking-for-advice-on-how-to-cite-a-project/14451).)

if you were to want to cite a specific observation from the set, then that would be different.

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