Ibercivis

Ibercivis is Spain's national citizen-science distributed-computing platform. Operated by the Ibercivis Foundation in collaboration with the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the University of Zaragoza, CIEMAT, and the Institute of Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), Ibercivis is structured like World Community Grid but focused on Spanish and Portuguese research — hosting a rotating portfolio of experiments instead of a single one.

The project began in 2008 as a successor to the earlier Zivis effort (2007) and was legally incorporated as a foundation in 2012. Over its history Ibercivis has hosted more than 60 experiments from 40 different research groups, spanning fusion plasma simulation, protein structure prediction, climate downscaling, computational materials science, epidemiological modelling, and more. Participation has reached over 60,000 citizen scientists.

A particularly visible moment came in April 2020, when the platform was restarted by the Ibercivis Foundation and CSIC to screen existing drug compounds for antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2 — volunteers' CPUs directly supported drug-repurposing research during the early months of the pandemic.

Beyond computing, Ibercivis is a broader citizen-science institution: it also coordinates non-computational citizen-science projects in biodiversity, health, and social sciences across Spain, making it one of the most institutionally mature citizen-science organisations in Europe. The BOINC-based computing platform is its technical backbone.