Platform Licensing Fees

With FieldScope, participants in citizen and community science projects or other networked field studies can conveniently upload spreadsheets of measurements, observation data, and multimedia to a shared project database. Organizers of these projects (including nonprofits, county and state governments, and schools) and contributors can then use FieldScope's sophisticated graphing and mapping visualization tools to make meaning of the collective project data.

FieldScope is hosted by BSCS Science Learning, a science education nonprofit organization. FieldScope is available at low-to-no cost rates as a hosting platform for citizen and community science project data. A table of annual licensing fees is included below. 

Benefits

Hosting a project on FieldScope allows project participants to contribute data and information to a cloud-hosted database. These data include many different environmental observations, including both numeric and categorical data (i.e., contributors select from a list of values pre-selected by project organizers). Participants may also upload media, including photo, video, audio, and document files.

Some of the highlights of hosting a project on FieldScope include

• the ability to easily customize a project homepage with an organizational logo and project information,
• having access to a mobile-friendly web interface contributors can use to upload their data,
• being able to define the data entry form that project contributors fill out and continue to customize it over time,
• allowing project contributors to utilize sophisticated visualization tools to analyze data in maps and graphs, and
• augmenting these visualization tools with the inclusion of other web-hosted GIS maps and layers.

Licensing Fees

The following fee structure is applied annually once a licensing agreement is signed. This fee structure continues until a project is cancelled:

Number of new observations  (data points) contributed to a project per year	Annual license fees
< 100 observations per year	$50
100 - 999 observations per year	$100
1,000 - 4,999 observations per year	$750
5,000 - 10,000 observations per year	$2,500
> 10,000 observations per year	$5,000

Fee Waiver Program

To make sure that cost is not a barrier to projects that would like to use FieldScope, a fee waiver program is available. Qualifying projects can apply to this program and may have annual license fees partially or completely waived. Email [e-mail] for more information on how to apply.