Little did Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and other ‘gentlemen scientists’ know, when they were making their scientific discoveries, that centuries later they would inspire a new field of scientific practice, research and innovation called citizen science. Citizen science can be defined in lay terms as ‘scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional sci-entists and scientific institutions’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2014), foregrounding the role of the professional scientist, which has become established as a profession in the past two centuries. The current growth and availability of citizen science projects and relevant web-based appli-cations and mobile apps to support citizen involvement in scientific discovery cannot be overstated. In principle, almost everyone has the opportunity to become a citizen scientist and to contribute to a scientific discipline or topic of interest – often without having any relevant profes-sional qualifications. Instead of ‘gentlemen scientists’, we now have a much larger group of usually well-to-do and highly educated citizens con-tributing to scientific discovery (and, in some cases, the over-representa-tion of men persists).