Online research projects
One option I can think of is in engaging in writing open source software related to such fields. You can gather experience in setting up goals and realizing them and you will work together with academics, students and hobby enthusiasts in the open source community. 

A scientific/research project is often not very different to a open source software project with a experienced PI/group leader and PhD students, undergraduate students. 

Github or scicomp/datascience/stats.stackexchange could be a good starting point or this citizen science register.