The Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2015 was incorporated into the America Competes Act (Sec 402) and passed in the Senate on December 10, 2016. This is the first bill to explicitly grant the federal goverment authority to use crowdsourcing and citizen science methods to advance scientific research. The bill also provides guidelines for how to carry out these projects, answers questions about data access and availability, and encourages collaboration in the public and private sector. Learn more.