In a curious cosmic coincidence, Bee (Sabine Hossenfelder, of the Backreaction blog) yesterday posted “The Holy Grail of Crackpot Filtering: How the arXiv decides what’s science – and what’s not.” Its scope overlaps quite a bit with your post, Brian.

In astronomy at least, there are – today – two groups of people whose inputs to the profession are extremely limited: amateurs, and citizen scientists (e.g. those who are active in Radio Galaxy Zoo). The extent to which the diversity of their perspectives, and how, differ from that of professionals, is largely unknown.

For example, Marshall+ (2015) “Ideas for Citizen Science in Astronomy” (in AURA; link: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-astro-081913-035959) covers *what* citizen scientists (and amateurs; they’re not distinguished) do, but not *what their perspectives are*.

And with some notable exceptions (e.g. Phil Marshall’s own citizen science project, Space Warps), citizen science-based projects in astronomy are designed, run, and primarily for the benefit of, professional astronomers … few have any non-professionals on The Team, let alone on the Science Team, for example.

The barriers to getting independent research (in astronomy) done by non-professionals published are truly daunting; unless those researchers first get a PhD (or at least an MSc), and/or team up with at least one professional, their work will almost never see the light of (professional) day (i.e. get published in the likes of ApJ or AJ). Just one tiny barrier: the papers they’d need to reference, to write a paper good enough to be accepted by AJ (say), are for the most part behind paywalls. This is despite the fact that the published research was almost certainly almost completely paid for by them (as taxpayers).

What perspectives do such non-professionals have, which, if included in the body of astronomy, would enrich it? An obvious one: the huge number of serendipitous discoveries they make!