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.

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’.

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.

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.

The Red de Popularización de la Ciencia y la Tecnología en América latina y el Caribe (RedPOP) (Latin American and Caribbean Network for the Popularization of Science and Technology) was created 25 years ago as an expression of a movement that started in the 1960s in favour of a scientific education. The purpose of this movement was to incorporate science into the general knowledge of the population by communicating science through different media, products and spaces such as museums and science centres. Since then, the movement has acquired considerable strength in Latin America and RedPOP has been a key factor to the development of this activity in the region, although several challenges still have to be addressed.

This essay seeks to explain what the “science of science communication” is by doing it. Surveying studies of cultural cognition and related dynamics, it demonstrates how the form of disciplined observation, measurement, and inference distinctive of scientific inquiry can be used to test rival hypotheses on the nature of persistent public conflict over societal risks; indeed, it argues that satisfactory insight into this phenomenon can be achieved only by these means, as opposed to the ad hoc story-telling dominant in popular and even some forms of scholarly discourse. Synthesizing the evidence, the essay proposes that conflict over what is known by science arises from the very conditions of individual freedom and cultural pluralism that make liberal democratic societies distinctively congenial to science. This tension, however, is not an “inherent contradiction”; it is a problem to be solved — by the science of science communication understood as a “new political science” for perfecting enlightened self-government.

The prioritization of neglected diseases in the policy making framework requires heightened advocacy [WHO, 2006]. Mass media positive publicity is among approaches that can be used to achieve this. This paper discusses practical use of mass media to do publicity and advocacy for a neglected disease and its vector. It uniquely presents online links to the analyzed newspaper and television news and opinion articles on tsetse and Trypanosomiasis. The paper shares entry points into mass media advocacy from a lessons learned perspective and notes the importance of understanding how the mass media works in order to achieve advocacy of neglected diseases using sleeping sickness as a case study. 

Communication about technology has long been neglected within the field of science and technology communication. This visual exploratory study focuses on how users can communicate with and about technology in public places through warning signs posted on technological devices.
Three broad categories of messages have been identified: bad design, malfunctioning and disciplining users. By analyzing examples within each category, we suggest that studying these communicative situations can be a key to understanding how users are engaged in continuous, elaborate and sometimes even conflicting framing of technological devices (e.g. with regard to their purpose, appropriate uses, shifting boundaries between functioning/malfunctioning); how such framing, in turn, can be used to readjust/realign social behavior and organizational routines.

The standardisation and selectivity of information were characteristics of science journalism in the printed medium that the digital editions of journals have inherited. This essay explores this fact from the international perspective, with a special focus on the Spanish case.

After being cosseted by the media for what they incorrectly considered to be a scientific feat, the author found himself widely boycotted by the more “responsible” media. The reason for this was his critical view of the evolution of science, which he felt had become a tool at the service of innovation, and, therefore, of industrial interests. The traditional image of science, which serves to help us to understand the world, still persists despite being perverted by commercial interests, because it is defended by naive people as well as by lobbies, themselves responsible for this debasement. Thus, the “militant” scientist is suspected of dishonourable behaviour and finds himself expelled from the “scientific community”, forced to express himself from the margins. As a result, a parallel world of information and debate is created, which presents truths different from those of the mainstream institutions.