Filter by keyword: Policy-making, communication and governance of science

Two concepts seemingly distant from each other, scientific education and European citizenship, have been the basis for "SEDEC - Science Education for the Development of European Citizenship", a European project funded by the European Commission in the framework of the Socrates/Comenius programme, aiming at producing training material addressed to European teachers. Started in autumn 2005, the project will end in 2008 with an in-service training course for European teachers and educators.

The Scientific Communications Act of 2007 (HR 1453) was introduced by the US House of Representatives on 9th March. The National Science Foundation, an independent United States Government agency that supports fundamental research and education, has thus been allowed to spend ten million dollars for each of the fiscal years 2008 through 2012 to provide communications training to improve the ability of scientists to engage in public dialogue.

NASA has decided to cut by 50% the next two-year budget for the Astrobiology Institute (NAI), and for all of the studies on life in outer space. This reduction follows an announcement made by Dr Michael Griffin, the Administrator of the space agency of the United States Government when, in addressing the Mars Society last summer, he clearly stated that xenobiology studies are marginal to the mission of NASA.

We inhabit an age in which economic progress in the European Union is equalized to more European research and better communication of that European research to the public. In highly developed Western democracies this implies an important role for the public as well as the mass media, both actors in a transforming public sphere. Beyond a call for more communication and more scientific literacy, the discourse has shifted to a call for more engagement and more participation on behalf of the citizen. There is a widespread sentiment however that the discipline of science communication is at a crossroads. In this paper it is argued that in a context of life politics and an increasing displacement of politics, one has to account for the trajectories of issue formation and the detours of public-ization to understand the dynamics of techno-scientific issues.

One can no longer rely on the presumption that scientists comply with the Mertonian value of disinterest and assume that they always tell the truth when spreading the results of their research projects. This can be rightly considered as the gist of the four-page report submitted to the board of the American journal Science by the committee chaired by the chemist John Brauman, from the Stanford University, and comprising three members from the Senior Editorial Board of the same journal, two eminent biologists specialised in stem cell research and a top editor from the other major general press medium of the Republic of Science, the British journal Nature.

In last times scientific PR activities are increased by number and quality. Especially in United States and, more recently, in Europe all the most important research institutions and universities have been equipped with communication officers able to circulate their own information through mass media. This is undoubtedly a positive news for science. In spite of this, it’s necessary to think about which effects can be created by marketing activity on scientific communication. In this commentary we asked some scientific professionals to tackle these problems from different points of view.

An informal, online survey of 1,059 reporters and public information officers, conducted this year by EurekAlert! (www.eurekalert.org), the science-news Web service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), seems to confirm key challenges associated with communicating science in a post-print, increasingly multi-media-focused era. As many newspapers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other regions continue to down-size, reporters still covering science and technology say they increasingly need good-quality images, as well as rapid access to researchers capable of making science more understandable to lay audiences. The EurekAlert! findings, released 16 August during the Euroscience Open Forum 2006 meeting in Munich, Germany, suggest that beyond the predictable reporter concerns of learning about breaking research news before the competition or the public, top concerns for today’s reporters are “finding researchers who can explain science,” and “obtaining photographs or other multimedia to support the story.” Judging the trustworthiness or integrity of scientific findings while avoiding “hype” also emerged as key concerns for 614 reporters who participated in the EurekAlert! survey, along with 445 public information officers.

If Europe is to become a knowledge–based economy1 knowledge must be freely available in Europe. The results of research across Europe can not be left inside laboratories and libraries. It has to available to the citizens, young people and commerce of Europe. And the main source of information for all these groups is the mass media, yet large parts of European research do not allocate sufficient importance to media relations.

It’s hard to be a science journalist these days. Still tired because of the “Long night of Science“ (probably the 6th during this summer) he or she is informed about the next “Children’s University days” and another “girls day” coming soon – alongside the daily zapping through the 50 press releases of the informationsdienst wissenschaft1 (are there really 50 newsworthy things happening every day in the labs of every European country?), not to speak of the dozens of press packages and glossy brochures of the pharmaceutical industry as well as the test kits of new products like a tongue cleaner (of which the phenomenal results are – of course – “scientifically proved”). In 2006 a journalist sometimes would wish that science communicators would communicate a little bit less – giving himself a little bit more time to find his own stories – just by himself.

This paper will outline the very successful initiatives to define common communication strategies amongst the world’s high energy physics laboratories. These initiatives have been extremely successful in changing the communication practices of a worldwide community of high energy physics labs and these practices are now expanding to the community of synchrotron radiation laboratories. The payback has been extremely encouraging, with a much higher regard for the importance of communication in senior management and, perhaps coincidentally, major increases in funding of physical sciences in the United States and other countries