In this commentary, I reflect on twenty years of teaching science communication at universities in Australia, Singapore and New Zealand. I discuss many of the challenges and opportunities for people working in the field. Some of the professional teaching experiences, challenges, and lessons I have learned may resonate with colleagues or help newcomers navigate the complexities of academic landscapes.

Our 20th anniversary this year is a special milestone for JCOM. It is a time to reflect on our past performance and future prospects. We pause to consider the activities of this journal, and the broad field of science communication over the past 20 years.

“The Queer Variable” is an edited collection of 40 interviews with LGBTQ+ people working in STEM. The interviews reveal the breadth of issues related to exclusion, discrimination, prejudice that LGBTQ+ people face; but also a remarkable progress and advancement of the whole STEM field to be more diverse, inclusive and equitable. The book is an empowering and enlightening reading for all those who are professionally active in STEM.

The Future of SciComm 2.0 conference was a one-day event in Brussels on April 26th 2022. Focusing on the future of European science communication, sixty participants from twelve countries with different expertise discussed the current challenges and possible solutions for the field. Key themes centred around disinformation, communicating global challenges, evidence-based practices and institutional structures woven through the plenary opening, afternoon workshops and the closing public panel discussion. The conclusion is a need for an European science communication ecosystem that is transdisciplinary, connected and cooperative in practice, weaving between policy, research and industry. Finally, citizen science and open science could be included as scholarly praxes to facilitate societal interconnectivity.

Both research and anecdote in science communication suggests that it is a field where women feel ‘at home’, with high numbers of women science communicators and students on training programmes, but why might this be the case? Using data gathered from a survey of 459 science communicators based in Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden and the U.K., we examine the perspectives of female science communicators, in terms of working practices, motivations and barriers to communicate.

In 2020, National Science Week events shifted online in response to Australian COVID-19 restrictions. Our research captures this rapid pivot from in-person to online science events, exploring experiences through audience and presenter questionnaires, and follow-up interviews. We examine characteristics of audiences for online science events, benefits and barriers of these events, and opportunities for online engagement. Key benefits were ease of attendance, new experiences enabled online, and greater control and flexibility. Lack of social interaction, technology issues, and audience reliability were identified as barriers. Our research suggests online events operate in a different sphere to in-person events and informs the delivery of engaging online experiences.

In this editorial, we reflect on our new roles as Editor-in-Chief and Deputy Editor of JCOM. We acknowledge the work of previous editors of JCOM, the Editorial Office and the wider JCOM community who have contributed to the success of the journal. We introduce the new Editorial Board and future directions for the journal, and we encourage suggestions from authors, reviewers and readers for taking the journal forward.

Concepts underpinning participatory science communication have much to offer science communication training and capacity building. This paper investigates a capacity building program with 15 science communicators from nine African countries involved in a six-week program in Australia. Data was collected via surveys, observations, informal interactions and ongoing relationships tracking program outcomes. Key features with a participatory nature included: holistic programs giving participants diverse skills and entry points; ensuring participant's freedom, agency, autonomy and self-efficacy; real-world networking as a self-directed participatory process; participant-led design processes to build skills for creating programs; and, embedding training in real-world contexts with deliberately selected publics.

Justin Gest's book “Mass appeal. Communicating policy ideas in multiple media” illustrates how to communicate research effectively. He offers insights into different mediums and provides practical examples of each. While the author has a background in policy research, his ideas and insight are of interest to a much broader audience with an interest in science communication.

Although research has been performed on participatory mechanisms in science and technology such as brokering, little seems written on intermediary organizations, e.g. science museums, taking up and embedding a participation brokerage role and systemic factors influencing these. This paper presents a qualitative case study in which six different intermediary organizations developed their participation brokerage role in a European RRI project. We demonstrate how structuring factors in the project context, the intermediary organization and the broader systemic context influenced the participation brokerage role take-up and embedding. Our findings yield implications for future capacity building endeavors among participation brokers in the making.