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Harassment, political interference, and violence against science communication are on the rise and pose considerable challenges for scientists, journalists, communicators, and institutions. In this commentary, we — an international group of researchers and practitioners — reflect on how scientists, science communicators and their institutions can balance the increased demand for meaningful public engagement while also appropriately responding to escalating harms of backlash. Drawing on existing literature and lived experience, we interrogate the consequences of attacks on science communication and review available support structures for scientists and practitioners. We propose ways to improve preparedness for and responses to public and political backlash, while considering the challenge of mitigating harassment without silencing valuable public feedback. In doing so, we aim to contribute to a resilient environment for scientists and communicators engaging with publics and to promote a more constructive discourse on socially contested issues in science and technology.

This commentary examines the tension between the recent consolidation of academic freedom as a human right in international and Inter-American law and its systematic erosion under authoritarian regimes, using Venezuela as a paradigmatic case. Drawing on General Comment No. 13, the Inter-American Principles on Academic Freedom and University Autonomy, and an operational framework developed in regional monitoring, it analyses how Venezuelan state policies, legal and institutional engineering, criminalisation and repression, economic strangulation and judicial interference, undermine core attributes of academic freedom CESCR1999,IACHR2021a. It shows how these measures reshape the ecosystem of science communication by narrowing who can speak, what can be researched and how knowledge circulates in society. The commentary concludes by identifying gaps in regional and international protection, highlighting comparative data from the Academic Freedom Index, and proposing pathways to strengthen academic-freedom safeguards and democratic science communication in the Americas.

Hostile online communication is an increasing concern in academia. This commentary focuses on online harassment victims in Finland and online harassment perpetration in Europe. Data are drawn from representative surveys of Finnish academic research and teaching staff and national samples from Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland. In Finland, 30% of academics reported online harassment within the past 6 months. Victims were disproportionately senior staff, minorities, and those in the social sciences and humanities. Only approximately 18% of the perpetrators were a member of the respondent's work community at their university. Public engagement in the media heightened risk. Victims reported more distress, lower trust, and weaker workplace support. Across Europe, men reported having sent offensive or threatening online messages more commonly. Perpetration was associated with younger age, psychological distress, and higher online involvement. These findings highlight the need to strengthen institutional support and improve digital culture to protect academic freedom and well-being.

In this commentary, we examine patterns of attacks against scholars focusing on the case of Germany. Drawing on the responses to open and closed questions in a recent survey of 2,600 German researchers, we identify context- and field-specific patterns of science hostility. While most responding researchers do not experience severe attacks, those engaged in specific fields may be at a higher risk of being threatened. We argue that attacks on researchers may not be perceived as acts of hostility against scientific institutions but rather emerge in the context of controversial topics. By drawing from material of open-ended questions, we provide context of such controversial topics in Germany. Our results suggest that these topics are disputed not only in public forums, but also in academic contexts — and not always appropriately. Such controversies both affect and transcend higher education institutions, as attacks can also originate from researchers themselves. Furthermore, our material suggests that scholars are concerned about how expertise is, or should be, represented in these contexts, and about how deliberation on these topics on campus can be upheld.

Correction of misinformation is a top priority for scientific organizations. Concern over misinformation is particularly prominent in social media, which is characterized by incivility. Because correcting misinformation online can expose scientists to uncivil responses or personal attacks, understanding barriers and motivations to correct misinformation among individual scientists is critical to identifying how institutions can best support scientists to maintain engagement in public communication of science. In this commentary, we review survey data of scientists at land-grant universities in the United States ($n = 413$) and find that a tendency to self-censor is not related to scientists' propensity to correct misinformation in social media. Deliberative aspirations, however — or the prospect of opening up peoples' minds to other perspectives — are related to behavioral intentions to correct misinformation for women scientists, in particular, as shown by a significant gender interaction effect. We conclude with specific recommendations that support motivations aligned with deliberative aspirations.

The commentary diagnoses a structural contradiction: policy, institutions, and funders often encourage outward-facing activity while outsourcing its risks to individual scholars or external institutions. Integrating interviews with climate change researchers (N=13) as a case study alongside selected scholarship (without claiming completeness), we document how institutional reputation can overshadow researcher-centered support, how training often underaddresses emotional and security burdens, and how assistance can wane when harassment escalates. While various studies — including our own — still point to inadequate support structures, there is a wide range of services on offer that could prove effective in the long term. We elaborate on some of these in more detail, with a particular focus on Germany as the authors' (academic) home country.

Scientists face growing pressure to share their research with the public — an ethical and professional duty that can sometimes lead to public hostility when addressing sensitive, controversial, or unpopular topics. Negative reactions from society, often worsened by social media, threaten not only the scientists themselves but also public trust in science and the integrity of knowledge systems. This commentary presents a case study of two scientists based in southern Africa, Professor Tulio de Oliveira and Professor Sikhulile Moyo, who identified the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) in November 2021. After sharing their findings with the relevant authorities, they encountered a wave of public criticism and abuse. Using insights from interviews with these scientists, we examine the different forms of this abuse, its impact, and the coping strategies they employed. We highlight the broader lessons this case offers for contemporary science communication, arguing that protecting scientists who face public backlash when sharing their research is essential for safeguarding science as a whole. We also suggest ways individuals, institutions, and the scientific community can create more supportive research environments for scientists working on potentially sensitive political or social issues.

Hostility towards science has emerged as a significant challenge in contemporary science communication, particularly in increasingly politicised and digitally mediated public environments. Scholars across diverse disciplines are confronted with harassment, delegitimisation, political interference, disinformation, and personal attacks, especially when engaging in public communication. This editorial introduces the JCOM commentary set “Scholars Under Attack” and situates hostility towards science within broader transformations of media ecosystems, political polarisation, and contested epistemic authority. The article argues that current debates remain conceptually fragmented and empirically underdeveloped, with limited comparative and longitudinal evidence regarding the scope, forms, and consequences of hostility directed at researchers. To address these gaps, the editorial proposes a working definition of hostility towards science as practices, discourses, and actions that undermine the authority, credibility, or integrity of scientific actors, knowledge, and institutions in politicised public arenas. The commentary set brings together interdisciplinary and international perspectives from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australia, highlighting how experiences of hostility vary across political systems, institutional contexts, disciplines, and social identities. The contributions examine online harassment, gendered hostility, misinformation, academic freedom, institutional shortcomings, and the paradoxical dynamics of visibility in digital communication. Collectively, they emphasise the need for more systematic empirical research, stronger institutional support structures, and nuanced conceptual approaches that distinguish hostility from legitimate critique while recognising the democratic importance of public science communication.

Public communication of science has become a central component in the relationship between science and society. However, the media exposure of research staff has given rise to new forms of hostility, especially in digital environments. The study Experiences of researchers who interact with the media and social networks in Spain ScienceMediaCentreEspana2024 investigates — via a survey (N=237) — the incidence and typology of these attacks in the Spanish context. More than half of the research staff (51.05%) reported experiencing negative incidents, with a higher prevalence among women (56.9%) than men (46.2%). The attacks differ by gender: women face more challenges regarding their scientific capacity and sexist remarks, whereas men are more frequently targeted over their professional integrity. These dynamics reveal structural gender biases that affect the wellbeing and legitimacy of female scientists, emphasising the need for institutional policies with a gender perspective.

TikTok has become an increasingly important platform for communication, yet it remains understudied in science communication research. This commentary addresses this gap by discussing findings from an exploratory interview study with social scientists who actively communicate about science on TikTok. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews and one author's platform experience, we examine the types of hostility researchers encounter and how they cope with criticism and harassment in their digital public engagement. A central and counter-intuitive finding is that participants often normalise, and sometimes value negative responses as these inspire content, provoke discussion, and boost engagement. Thus, hostility is reframed as a form of communicative capital. This dynamic exemplifies the “Engagement Paradox,” defined here as the tension in which negative feedback simultaneously acts as validation and as a strategic resource to enhance visibility. We conclude by discussing how the infrastructural arrangements of platforms and their political-economic foundations shape science communication and highlight the norms they (re)create amid the post-normal conditions of science communication.