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Jun 16, 2020 Commentary

The Australian Science Communicators conference 2020

by Linden Ashcroft , Mia Cobb , Lisa Bailey , Jenny Martin , Scott Daniel

This special issue of JCOM features six commentary articles from the research stream of the Australian Science Communicators conference, held in February 2020. These opportunistic assessments and deliberate analyses explore important themes of trust, engagement, and communication strategy across a diverse range of scientific contexts. Together, they demonstrate the importance of opportunities to come together and share the research that underpins our practice. The conference and these commentaries enable us to engage in professional development during these exceptional times when successful evidence-based science communication is of critical significance.

Are we Foot and Mouth Disease ready?

by Jennifer Manyweathers, Marta Hernandez-Jover, Lynne Hayes, Barton Loechel, Jennifer Kelly, Simone Felton, Marwan El Hassan, Rob Woodgate and Yiheyis Maru

Health vs. hedonism: public communication of nutrition science

by Catherine Lockley

How a climate change sceptic politician changed their mind

by Cobi Calyx and Jenny Low

Lessons from Laos: selecting appropriate communication media for context

by Wesley Ward

The communication of scientific research in news media: Contemporary challenges and opportunities

by Georgia Dempster

Volume 19Issue 032020

Oct 14, 2019 Practice Insight

Telling stories in science communication: case studies of scholar-practitioner collaboration

by Michelle Riedlinger , Luisa Massarani , Marina Joubert , Ayelet Baram-Tsabari , Marta Entradas , Jennifer Metcalfe

Reflecting on the practice of storytelling, this practice insight explores how collaborations between scholars and practitioners can improve storytelling for science communication outcomes with publics. The case studies presented demonstrate the benefits of collaborative storytelling for inspiring publics, promoting understanding of science, and engaging publics more deliberatively in science. The projects show how collaboration between scholars and practitioners [in storytelling] can happen across a continuum of scholarship from evaluation and action research to more critical thinking perspectives. They also show how stories of possible futures and community efficacy can support greater engagement of publics in evidence-informed policymaking. Storytelling in collaborations between scholars and practitioners involves many activities: combining cultural and scientific understandings; making publics central to storytelling; equipping scientists to tell their own stories directly to publics; co-creating stories; and retelling collaborative success stories. Collaborative storytelling, as demonstrated in these case studies, may improve the efficacy of science communication practice as well as its scholarship.

Volume 18Issue 052019Special Issue: Stories in Science Communication, 2019 (PCST Stories)

Jun 14, 2019 Article

The possibilities of Open Science for knowledge transfer in the science-policy interface

by Arko Olesk , Esta Kaal , Kristel Toom

This paper explores the possible role of Open Science in the knowledge transfer between research and policy, focusing on its potential use by scientific councillors at Estonian ministries. Qualitative interviews with scientific councillors show that they perceive their role as intermediaries between research and policy and focus their work on improving the quality of research commissioned by their ministry. This process, for them, involves using existing academic articles and datasets to which, however, they lack official access. We show that Open Science can contribute to knowledge transfer if there are knowledge brokers in public sector organizations.

Volume 18Issue 032019Special Issue: Communication at the Intersection of Science and Politics, 2019 (Intersection of Science and Politics)

Sep 26, 2018 Letter

Peer-reviewed publishing of results from Citizen Science projects

by Gabriele Gadermaier , Daniel Dörler , Florian Heigl , Stefan Mayr , Johannes Rüdisser , Robert Brodschneider , Christine Marizzi

Citizen science (CS) terms the active participation of the general public in scientific research activities. With increasing amounts of information generated by citizen scientists, best practices to go beyond science communication and publish these findings to the scientific community are needed. This letter is a synopsis of authors' personal experiences when publishing results from citizen science projects in peer-reviewed journals, as presented at the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2018. Here, we address authors' selection criteria for publishing CS data in open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as barriers encountered during the publishing process. We also outline factors that influence the probability of publication using CS data, including 1) funding to cover publication costs; 2) quality, quantity and scientific novelty of CS data; 3) recommendations to acknowledge contributions of citizen scientists in scientific, peer-reviewed publications; 4) citizen scientists' preference of the hands-on experience over the product (publication) and 5) bias among scientists for certain data sources and the scientific jargon. These experiences show that addressing these barriers could greatly increase the rate of CS data included in scientific publications.

Volume 17Issue 032018

Sep 10, 2018 Article

Structure and development of science communication research: co-citation analysis of a developing field

by Adrian Rauchfleisch , Mike S. Schäfer

Since the early 1990s, there has been a considerable increase in the number of scientific studies on science communication, and this increase has been accompanied by a diversification of the research field. This study focuses on one aspect of this development: it analyses how citation network structures within the field have developed over time, and whether science communication research shows signs of becoming a research field or a discipline in its own right. Employing a co-citation analysis of scholarly publications published between 1996 and 2015, it assesses to what extent a coherent communication network exists within science communication research. The results show a field with a diverse internal structure and clear internal changes over time which suggest an increasing emancipation of the field.

Volume 17Issue 032018

Apr 17, 2018 Commentary

Open science in the making: preliminary remarks on the putative effects of specialised online portals on scholarly collaboration and community building

by Dirk Hommrich

This commentary introduces a preliminary conceptual framework for approaching putative effects of scholarly online systems on collaboration inside and outside of academia. The first part outlines a typology of scholarly online systems (SOS), i.e., the triad of specialised portals, specialised information services and scholarly online networks which is developed on the basis of nine German examples. In its second part, the commentary argues that we know little about collaborative scholarly community building by means of SOS. The commentary closes with some remarks on further research questions regarding the putative impact of such systems on science communication and scholarly community building.

Volume 17Issue 022018

Apr 17, 2018 Commentary

Introduction to “Specialised portals, online information services, scholarly online networks: the impact of e-infrastructures on science communication and scholarly community building”

by Dirk Hommrich

While most researchers still primarily use emails and simple websites for professional communication, the number of specialised online portals, information services and scholarly social online networks is constantly growing. This development led to the 6th workshop organized by the team of openTA, an online portal for technology assessment. This issue of JCOM pools commentaries on the workshop which deal with questions such as: what are the criteria of successful digital infrastructures? Which potential for changing workflows or scholarly interaction and collaboration patterns do we ascribe to digital infrastructures?

Open infrastructure and community: the case of astronomy

by Niels Taubert

A collaboration platform for sociology. How to increase accessibility, visibility and sustainability of scientific information in sociology

by Johann Schaible, Sonja Strunk and David Brodesser

Open science in the making: preliminary remarks on the putative effects of specialised online portals on scholarly collaboration and community building

by Dirk Hommrich

Lots of data, lots of hurdles: aggregating usage information from distributed Open Access repositories

by Ulrich Herb

Volume 17Issue 022018

Apr 17, 2018 Commentary

Open infrastructure and community: the case of astronomy

by Niels Taubert

This comment focuses on an early case of an open infrastructure that emerged in the 1990s in international astronomy. It targets the reasons for this infrastructure's tremendous success and starts with a few comments on the term ‘digital infrastructure’. Subsequently, it provides a brief description of the most important components of the infrastructure in astronomy. In a third step, the use of one component — the arXiv, an open access repository for manuscripts — is analyzed. It concludes with some considerations about the success and acceptance of this infrastructure in astronomy.

Volume 17Issue 022018

Apr 17, 2018 Commentary

Lots of data, lots of hurdles: aggregating usage information from distributed Open Access repositories

by Ulrich Herb

This article reflects the results of the project “Open Access Statistics”, which was designed to collect standardized usage figures for scientific documents. The data gathered were primarily intended to provide impact values based on document usage for Open Access documents as these were excluded from databases used to provide citation based impact scores. The project also planned the implementation of more sophisticated procedures such as network analyses, but was confronted with complex legal requirements.

Volume 17Issue 022018

Apr 04, 2018 Editorial

Branching out: new JCOM América Latina for dynamic science communication community

by Emma Weitkamp , Luisa Massarani

April marks a milestone in the history of JCOM, with the launch of new features for the International, English language journal alongside the launch of a sister journal, JCOM América Latina which will cater for the dynamic and fast growing Spanish and Portuguese speaking science communication community. Luisa Massarani, a long standing JCOM Editorial Board member, has led the development of JCOM América Latina and will act as the Editor for the new journal. JCOM and JCOM América Latina will work closely together, providing free, open access publishing for science communication research across the globe.

Volume 17Issue 022018

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