John Ziman with his old-fashioned ways, was a real British gentleman of the colonies. Born and raised in New Zealand, Ziman belonged to that large group of men and women that went back to their fathers’ land in the last century from the Commonwealth countries. In many cases, they were individuals with an outstanding intellect and, therefore, a real tresure trove for Great Britain, which drew from those remote places not only gems, tea, perfumes and raw materials, but also enlightened minds and reliable personalities.

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.

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.

The attacks of September 11 2001 and in particular, the sending of letters containing anthrax spores the following October had a profound effect on society, and at the same time on science and its communicative mechanisms. Through a quanto-qualitative analysis of articles taken from four publications: two daily newspapers, the Corriere della Sera from Italy and the New York Times from the United States and two science magazines, Science and Nature, we have shown how the aforementioned events provoked the emergence of media attention regarding bioterrorism. A closer reading of the articles shows that today, science – including that found in science magazines – is closely related to politics, economics and the debate over the freedom to practice communicate. The very mechanisms of communication between scientists were changed as a result of this debate, as can be seen from the signing of the Denver Declaration in February 2003, which brought about the preventative self-censorship of publication of biomedical research findings.

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.

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

Science information professionals need to make choices through which media they want to communicate with the public. In reaching large audiences outside the domain of formal diffusion of knowledge, the choice may be between the old medium television and the new medium Internet. It seems that general scientific research is focused more and more on the Internet as a favorite means for information exchange and that the old mass medium television plays only a minor role. But when we look at (1) how the public spends their leisure time on television and the Internet, (2) how effective these media are in transferring information, and (3) how much these media are trusted as reliable sources of information, the old medium television should still be regarded as the number one medium to be used for science communication, although there are some limitations for its use.

The Royal Society published in late June a report entitled «Science Communication. Survey of factors affecting science communication by scientists and engineers». It is an in-depth survey on the communication addressed to non-specialist audiences that was carried out interviewing a wide and representative sample of UK scientists and engineers.

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.

Following the example of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, interactive science museums are meant to be informal and enjoyable places where visitors, regardless of their age and background, are stimulated to practice their abilities to explore the world from a scientific point of view or to reacquire it in the case of adults who are far from science for professional reasons. Our study, which belongs to a relatively recent, but increasingly richer and complex tradition of researches on this topic, aims at contributing to answering the question whether, within the context of hands-on museums, this desired reacquisition of scientific exploration actually occurs for all visitors; more precisely, it aims at contributing to the discussion resulting from this question with reference to both possible answers and methods to find them. The study described below was carried out for a Science Communication Master thesis in Trieste (student: Monia Cardella, supervisor: Paola Rodari) and, therefore, it is inevitably limited: in fact, in order to deal with such a complex issue and to perform more detailed investigations on the field longer time and more resources would have been necessary. However, both methods used and results obtained from it, although provisional, are significant enough to deserve our attention.