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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Organized creationism is not widespread in Italy. It is a rather limited resource politicians and columnists draw upon when wishing to stir up a “debate”. Judging by its results, Italian creationism is old-fashioned, still comparing Darwin’s theories with the Bible, hoping to find the wreckage of Noah’s Ark, holding conferences on the origin of apes, questioning fossil dating and distorting science debates with out-of-context quotations from disparate sources. It is not a lobby that could obtain considerable electoral support, win favour or drag scientists to court.

The American particle physics community is in jeopardy and may end up drowning in a boundless sea trying to grasp at non-existing funds, dragging US physics and science as a whole to the bottom. This is a price the most powerful and high-tech country of the world cannot afford, as warned by the editors of a report published in late April by the National Academy of Sciences1. Behind so much alarm is the International Linear Collider (ILC) – a large particle accelerator facility which, according to the report, should be built on American territory, if research on the elementary constituents of nature is to survive in the United States. The ILC will probably cost a total of five hundred million dollars in the first five years, whereas billions will have to be invested in the subsequent seven years. Hardly impressive, however, if compared with the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the biggest and costliest machine ever conceived in the history of science. Devised to describe the first instants of the universe, as many will recall, the SSC project was severely hampered by political and bureaucratic plots in 1993, when the Clinton administration decided to halt work on the accelerator, after ten years and approximately two billion dollars already spent.

The debate on Darwin’s theory of evolution is a unique case for observing some particular ways in which science is perceived and experienced in society. It is a dispute which is really not very scientific at all, since it ultimately derives from the attempt to discredit a corroborated scientific explanation (and to limit its teaching) by fundamentalist fringe groups of religious and political movements of various extraction. However, it is undeniable that the clash between creationists and evolutionists must also involve, in a critical and self-reflective way, the communicative weaknesses of science and its inability to assert itself as a widespread and fully shared culture, as was also stressed by the Nature magazine in April 2005. With an international viewpoint, ranging from the United States to Europe, from Australia to Italy, in this dossier we try to make a summary investigation of the current state of the debate, with a particularly attentive eye on the communicative strategies that contend in the two fields.