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Dec 15, 2015 Commentary

Open Science training and education: challenges and difficulties on the researchers' side and in public engagement

Open Science may become the next scientific revolution, but still lingers in a pre-paradigmatic phase, characterised by the lack of established definitions and domains. Certainly, Open Science requires a new vision of the way to produce and share scientific knowledge, as well as new skills. Therefore, education plays a crucial role in supporting this cultural change along the path of science. This is the basic principle inspiring the collection of essays published in this issue of JCOM, which deals with many subjects ranging from open access to the public engagement in scientific research, from open data to the social function of preprint servers for the physicians' community. These are issues that go along with the targets of the FOSTER project (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research) funded by the European Union, which has provided interesting food for thought in order to write this commentary.

Open science

by Ann Grand

The time has come for managing and sharing research data in universities

by Ignasi Labastida

Open Access: what's in it for me as an early career researcher?

by Nancy Pontika

Preprints and peer review: a lesson from physics

by Alessandro Delfanti

Volume 14Issue 042015

Dec 15, 2015 Commentary

The time has come for managing and sharing research data in universities

by Ignasi Labastida

During the last decade universities have developed policies and infrastructures to support open access to publications but now it is time to move a step forward. There is an increasing demand for accessing data supporting the research results to validate and reproduce them. Therefore universities have to be prepared for this new challenge that goes beyond dissemination because it requires a strategy for managing research data within institutions. In this paper I will try to give some hints on how to deal with this challenge that can be framed in the new open science movement aimed at providing openness in all the whole cycle of research.

Volume 14Issue 042015

Dec 15, 2015 Commentary

Preprints and peer review: a lesson from physics

by Alessandro Delfanti

For decades, particle physicists have been using open access archives of preprints, i.e. research papers shared before the submission to peer reviewed journals. With the shift to digital archives, this model has proved to be attractive to other disciplines: but can it be exported? In particle physics, archives do not only represent the medium of choice for the circulation of scientific knowledge, but they are central places to build a sense of belonging and to define one's role within the community.

Volume 14Issue 042015

Sep 29, 2015 Commentary

Beyond the dissemination of Earth Observation research: stakeholders’ and users’ involvement in project co-design

by Alba L'Astorina , Irene Tomasoni , Anna Basoni , Paola Carrara

Modern technology and innovation research needs to analyse and collect users’ requirements from the outset of the project’s design, according to the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach. Bringing in new services without involving end-users in the whole research process does not make for optimal results in terms of scientific, technological and economic impact. This commentary reports on research experience of stakeholder involvement and co-production in Italy, implemented in Earth Observation downstream services at regional level. It reports the participative approach and method adopted and the impacts and benefits derived.

Volume 14Issue 032015

Sep 29, 2015 Commentary

Evaluating impact and quality of experience in the 21st century: using technology to narrow the gap between science communication research and practice

by Eric A. Jensen

Access to high quality evaluation results is essential for science communicators to identify negative patterns of audience response and improve outcomes. However, there are many good reasons why robust evaluation linked is not routinely conducted and linked to science communication practice. This essay begins by identifying some of the common challenges that explain this gap between evaluation evidence and practice. Automating evaluation processes through new technologies is then explicated as one solution to these challenges, capable of yielding accurate real-time results that can directly feed into practice. Automating evaluation through smartphone and web apps tied to open source analysis tools can deliver on-going evaluation insights without the expense of regularly employing external consultants or hiring evaluation experts in-house. While such automation does not address all evaluation needs, it can save resources and equip science communicators with the information they need to continually enhance practice for the benefit of their audiences.

Volume 14Issue 032015

Sep 29, 2015 Commentary

Ships, Clocks & Stars: the quest for impact

by Katherine McAlpine

Between 2010 and July 2015, a group of researchers at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge and the National Maritime Museum were engaged in an Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project “The Board of Longitude 1714–1828: Science, innovation and empire in the Georgian world”. The project team included a dedicated Public Engagement Officer whose role was to engage audiences with the outputs of the research project.
The National Maritime Museum celebrated the 300 th anniversary of the 1714 Longitude Act with a major exhibition, Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude, which told the story of the 18th century quest for longitude, alongside a series of longitude-themed events. To commemorate the same anniversary, NESTA launched the 2014 Longitude Prize, a challenge to find a solution to today’s equivalent of the longitude problem, with the problem chosen by a public vote. Using these two examples as a case study, I explore how history of science helps science communication organisations engage people with science, and vice versa.

Volume 14Issue 032015

Sep 29, 2015 Commentary

Beyond dissemination — science communication as impact

by Laura Fogg-Rogers , Ana Margarida Sardo , Ann Grand

The drive for impact from research projects presents a dilemma for science communication researchers and practitioners — should public engagement be regarded only as a mechanism for providing evidence of the impact of research or as itself a form of impact? This editorial describes the curation of five commentaries resulting from the recent international conference
‘Science in Public: Research, Practice, Impact’. The commentaries reveal the issues science communicators may face in implementing public engagement with science that has an impact; from planning and co-producing projects with impact in mind, to organising and operating activities which meet the needs of our publics, and finally measuring and evaluating the effects on scientists and publics in order to ‘capture impact’.

Ships, Clocks & Stars: the quest for impact

by Katherine McAlpine

Beyond the dissemination of Earth Observation research: stakeholders’ and users’ involvement in project co-design

by Alba L'Astorina, Irene Tomasoni, Anna Basoni and Paola Carrara

Reflections on the impact of (playful) deliberation processes in contexts of responsible research and innovation

by Marjoleine G. van der Meij

Evaluating impact and quality of experience in the 21st century: using technology to narrow the gap between science communication research and practice

by Eric A. Jensen

Moving beyond the seductive siren of reach: planning for the social and economic impacts emerging from school-university engagement with research

by Richard Holliman and Gareth Davies

Volume 14Issue 032015

Sep 29, 2015 Commentary

Moving beyond the seductive siren of reach: planning for the social and economic impacts emerging from school-university engagement with research

by Richard Holliman , Gareth Davies

In the past 25 years school-university partnerships have undergone a transition from ad hoc to strategic partnerships. Over the previous two-and-a-half-years we have worked in partnership with teachers and pupils from the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance in Milton Keynes, UK.
Our aims have been to encourage the Open University and local schools in Milton Keynes to value, recognise and support school-university engagement with research, and to create a culture of reflective practice.
Through our work we have noted a lack of suitable planning tools that work for researchers, teachers and pupils. Here we propose a flexible and adaptable metric to support stakeholders as they plan for, enact and evaluate direct and meaningful engagement between researchers, teachers and pupils. The objective of the metric is to make transparent the level of activity required of the stakeholders involved — teachers, pupils and researchers — whilst also providing a measure for institutions and funders to assess the relative depth of engagement; in effect, to move beyond the seductive siren of reach.

Volume 14Issue 032015

Sep 29, 2015 Commentary

Reflections on the impact of (playful) deliberation processes in contexts of responsible research and innovation

by Marjoleine G. van der Meij

This commentary shares a personal ‘learning curve’ of a science communication researcher about the impact of (playful) tools and processes for inclusive deliberation on emerging techno-scientific topics in the contemporary era of two-way science and technology communication practices; needed and desired in responsible research and innovation (RRI) contexts. From macro-level impacts that these processes are supposed to have on research and innovation practices and society, as encouraged by the RRI community, the author discovers more about ‘micro-level’ impacts; through conversations with peers of her department Athena (VU University, Amsterdam), as well as through experiencing the SiP 2015 conference in Bristol. Based on that, she defines several ‘impact-spheres’: a modular set of flexibly defined micro-level impacts that events in RRI contexts can have on both academic and non-academic participants, with respect and relationship development as focal assets to aim for; individual (micro-)changes that potentially build up towards an ‘RRI world’.

Volume 14Issue 032015

Jun 11, 2015 Commentary

On activism of European researchers about science policy

by Alain Trautmann

The organization and functioning of research have radically changed over the last 10 or 20 years, as a result of a determined political action. The activism of some scientists, during this period, has failed to significantly alter this trend. So far. Today, New Public Management is triumphant. It has been implemented by a category of former scientists who have become administrators, evaluators, organizers. As a result, the prime role of scientific publications is no longer to exchange scientific information but to allow a measure of scientific production, and to rank the principal investigators. Now, the massive use of numerical tools (impact factors, h index), allows policy makers and their collaborators to evaluate publications without reading them. In addition, researchers are told to work in a budgetarily stable system (or even a decreasing one), with internal dynamics that should make it increase exponentially. This has led to the development of precarious jobs. One day, this bubble will explode.

Volume 14Issue 022015

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