Cadmore media player playing video Going Beyond “Just Trust the Science”: Innovations in Science Communication
Video Player
Accessibility
Using forms mode, you can utilize keyboard shortcuts to make usability more efficient.
Space bar will play and pause the video. Pressing escape will close all displays and pressing it again will jump to the end of the player.
You can press A to open the Keyboard Shortcut Dialog which also provides an audio description of the player and all of its features.
Language
1x
Play Speed
Adjust Volume
Transcript
Search
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Re-center
Segments
Result Count
of
Click to jump to result
Search
Name:
Going Beyond “Just Trust the Science”: Innovations in Science Communication
Description:
Going Beyond “Just Trust the Science”: Innovations in Science Communication
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/2d4b6de5-3d60-4089-8065-cbd9ffeb0e3c/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_1.jpg
Duration:
T00H44M32S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/2d4b6de5-3d60-4089-8065-cbd9ffeb0e3c
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/2d4b6de5-3d60-4089-8065-cbd9ffeb0e3c/SSP2025 5-29 1430 - Session 2C.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=PCDWUH2Z86R47gABn7WMMfqNiXrnSWw1SGW57B0NFnE%3D&st=2025-12-26T06%3A06%3A06Z&se=2025-12-26T08%3A11%3A06Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2025-08-15T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
All right. So hi everyone. I'm so happy to have you all here today. My name is Laura Patton and I'm the head of government affairs for the US at Springer Nature. I'm really excited about this topic. I think you've heard all of it come up in various themes throughout every session today.
I've worked on some form of translation of science to policy for my entire career, starting when I worked in Congress. I wrote the abstract for this session back in early November, which I think feels like a lifetime ago for many of us. But I think the events of the past few months have demonstrated that figuring out effective science communication is more important than ever. I think we've all heard a lot about how everyone needs to get better at science communication, and my goal for this panel, and I think we have a great group here today, is to really talk about the specifics of how that can be done.
So I'm going to run through introductions quickly, and then we'll get right to discussion. We'll leave plenty of time for audience questions at the end. So do start thinking if there's anything you want to cover. So first up is Doctor fanuel muindi, a professor of practice in civic science journalism in the Department of Communication studies at Northeastern University, where he leads the civic science Media Lab. His lab.
His lab is journalistically mapping the civic nature of science to make it more accessible and actionable for scientists, communicators, educators, funders, entrepreneurs, and community leaders. A neuroscientist by training, Doctor, muindi earned his bachelor's from Morehouse College, his PhD from Stanford, and completed postdoc work at the Department of Brain and Cognitive science is at MIT. Next to him is Megan Phelan, the communications director for the science family of journals, where she oversees efforts to boost the visibility of forthcoming science family of journal content for reporters worldwide.
Prior to joining ars in 2013, she served as a senior writer at air worldwide, where she interacted with more than 65 PhD level scientists and engineers to communicate advances in wind engineering, seismology, climate science, and other fields, and previously she was a senior writer at The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. And then finally, we have Doctor David Schiffman, who many of you heard yesterday at the opening keynote.
David has about eight jobs, and I'll just mention a few of them here. An ocean conservation scientist who studies sharks and how to protect them. A science journalist and an award winning public science educator. His words have appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, the Washington Post, and a monthly. Ask a marine biologist column in scuba diving magazine, and he is the author of Why sharks matter from Johns Hopkins University press.
So, as you can tell, we have a great, we have great experience here across many levels of science communication. But I thought we could start by taking a step back and starting with Phanuel. In one of our early discussions about this topic, he mentioned that public engagement actually has its own communications problem. So start with if you want to talk a little more about that.
Yeah Shirley, nice to see such a full room. I was thinking earlier that there might be no one here, but actually, this is great to see you all. So, yeah, I wanted to just Zoom out a little bit and share with you from my perch what I see normally what gets me excited. Is that when you think about science communication, it's part of a much even bigger landscape of what we call civic science.
So when you look at this field, there's terminology that is very, very diverse. You've got science communication, public engagement with science, public understanding of science, you've got citizen science. And that has been changing more recently to participatory science, for example, science outreach. All these terms mixed bag together of practitioners and scholars that are doing this work and approaching it from multiple angles.
And you saw a little bit as well from David's talk yesterday. And that's what really gets me going. I'm a trained neuroscientist, and if you look within neuroscientists, there's some absolutely amazing work that is taking place at the intersection of neuroscience and society. Another term that is being used. And as well, I wanted to add, there is a field, a whole field called the Science of science communication, a whole journal dedicated to it as well.
That is there. And insights are coming out almost by the dozen load every day, new papers that are coming out about the ongoing work, what we're learning, what doesn't work, what is working. And here comes the problem. And this is the piece that I wrote in nature where I'm like, wow, there is so much taking place. We have this iceberg effect that there's this gap between scholarship and practice, and that is pointed at the lack of communication, more communication about the work that is taking place.
So every time I see someone like David giving a talk, I get absolutely excited. I'm like, wow, I want to learn more about what you're doing and most importantly, what you're learning. And so throughout this conversation, I hope to share a little bit of those insights, because what we spend in my lab doing all year long, hundreds or so interviews, is talking to people like David and asking them, what are you learning.
What are you doing. Actually, most importantly, what are you doing. What are you doing. David and I was like, wow, that is so cool. More people should know about it. Most importantly, what are you learning from that work. And we need more of that. And I hope today's conversation does that. So I also do have a note.
You talked about the deficit engagement model. I'm just going to prompt you to talk a little more about that. Yeah and David also talked about this yesterday too right. And this idea that the belief in the increase in knowledge will lead to the support of science. There's something missing in the non-expert public that we need to plug that hole. And there's been tons and tons of data showing that actually that's not the entire story that you can't just stop there.
It's It's necessary to inform, but it's not sufficient. That's the way I like to think, as a biologist. And so one example I think, was cited even this morning about if you look back in the 50s or 60s with the launch of Sputnik and the US moon landings. Here's a fun fact. At that time, science was heavily supported. There was a lot of support for science at that time. Science literacy, though, was actually not that high.
It was pretty low 30% knew or thought that the moon was smaller or was smaller than the Earth. Only 38% knew that. So there was still a lot of that gap, but yet there was still a lot of support for science. But here's the kicker. There is still a lot of deficit model engagement that is still out there right now. A lot of it.
And I'm sure David can share some examples. So we see a lot of models that are coming out, people who will continue to share, hey, bidirectional engagement is really where the work is. The question is, how do you do that. And that's where I hope some of you are here to hear about some examples of that. But yeah, the deficit type of thinking is still prevalent unfortunately.
And that is preventing us from truly engaging. For moving beyond just communication to engagement. Do you guys want to add. So we have our own. We have a communication problem in science communication. That's the question. OK I was getting excited about what you were saying.
Yeah I think it's definitely true. I think being at places like SSP and you all being open to hear about new things that we're trying and maybe still learning about, which I want to talk about today, is a really important process in spreading the word about things that maybe we could improve with input you all have. So I'll be talking about some of those today.
Yeah, I absolutely agree that science communication has a communication problem that so many of my professional researcher colleagues misused the term that they just straight up don't know what. Science communication is. Or they say, oh, of course, I engage in science communication. I published in this journal or I presented at this conference to 12 the 12 other people who understand what the title of my talk means.
That's not what we mean. And so many academic leadership people don't value this enough that I mentioned in the Q&A of my talk yesterday that so many of my colleagues who are full time academics, I'm actually at nine jobs now. So, so many of my colleagues who are full time academics, they have to do this stuff on the side in addition to their other. It's the joke in academia is you have so much freedom.
You can choose which 80 hours a week you work. So they have to do this stuff on the side, and it doesn't count towards the tenure promotion hiring stuff. So I think a lot of this corresponds with trust in science. How it's communicated, how people are thinking about it. I know that that's something Megan has in particular been thinking about at science. Is there any kind of initiatives or anything you want to share that worked or didn't work.
Things you've changed. Yeah so five things here, but each I can hit on pretty quickly. So thinking about how trust in science plays into effective science communication, like you said Daniel, the deficit model, just explaining what a research paper says isn't really so powerful anymore. There are a couple other things we've been thinking about at the science family journals.
When we're working with researchers to share their new results with the public. And the first is to be willing to get into what that paper says and what it doesn't say, and to be able to articulate the latter pretty clearly. This is what we know and this is what we don't. We had a press briefing last year on chlorinating water, and a revelation about a byproduct of that really important process that might lead to toxicity.
There was a signal that it was possible, but it wasn't yet a certainty. And we had some researchers do a really good job and come out and say, we want to tell you about this. Now, it may be something, but it might not be. And they answered many questions, many of the same questions about the potential health problem that research could pave the way to. And it might not.
And they did it patiently. They did it using answers in different forms. And it resulted in a lot of good press coverage about what was true and what wasn't in that paper. So researchers saying what they do know and what they don't is really important. Also, researchers being able to engage with people in their field who might have a slightly different view of something, but being willing to engage in front of reporters on that topic to show that they don't have an agenda, but ultimately, they want to get to the truth, is something that we are exploring right now with researchers on different papers that exhibit slightly different signals and something that we're excited about.
And we're also encouraging researchers to respond to press when they have questions about research integrity related aspects of their work. And we've given we've built some tips and tools that they could use to do this. This is not an easy thing to do, but we've built up some tips and tools that could help them in this process, because this could be a moment to build trust as well, and to explain the process of science, and to help build public understanding about how hard it is to do some of this work, and where errors can happen naturally.
And I guess the last thing is just to always be open to people's questions. Some of the press briefings we hold with researchers, they might get the same question in a couple different forms, but that means there's really a signal there, a curiosity. And so it's important to think about answering maybe in different ways or inviting different among your co-authors to answer using their different expertise.
Anything you guys want to add. Just a word about trust. It's used a lot and thrown around very, very heavily. And I just wanted to share with you that it's a loaded term and it means different things to different people. And so when you are saying my goal is to build trust in mind, you trust in science is different to trust in scientists. And so when the Pew shares their data, be careful what you're talking about.
Trust in scientists, the people. There was a study that just came out in Nature, no longer nature behavior. I believe human behavior. And that looked at trust in scientists across 68 countries. Turns out it's actually pretty high. And even the Pew results show it has gone down for sure due to COVID, but it's still pretty much higher than pretty much all the other fields that they looked at.
And that part of the story is always missing from this conversation. And for me, when I see that we have to be asking more specific questions, what about trust. Are you trying to address in science. Is it the perceived competence of scientists, the benevolence? These are actual dimensions that these studies look at integrity, openness, the willingness to listen. And so as publishers, we had a publisher publishers conference.
I think there are some things you can do as publishers. There's one example I know there's a question we're going to talk about later, but PNAS, for example, has a significant section that I found really fascinating. When you have an additional area where the authors write, not even layman's terms, but right in more accessible terms, trying to describe what was found, what was significant about the results.
Another journal, the Journal of science, policy and governance. They actually host trainings for some of their authors to write these op eds, these science policy op eds that are out there. So I think journal publishers can provide some trainings. And I know science and other places do provide that for scientists. But keep in mind that there's multiple ways to engage the public.
Public speaking is just one of these things that you can do. Writing but there is so much more and the diversity is absolutely insane, I'm telling you. And I spent most of my time talking to people who are doing this work, and there's always new ways people can do this. And funders are looking for innovative ways that they can support ideas to support ideas for scientists, science communicators, collaborations between journals in science communicators.
I think there's avenues there that could be tapped into existing expertise, that we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We actually don't need to reinvent the wheel. So I think one of the most interesting parts of that, too, is who you're trying to communicate with. And, David, I think you got to this a little bit yesterday, but it's not is it the public, is it policymakers, is it the media.
Is it your fellow academics. And what you're communicating changes when as government affairs, I think most about communicating with policymakers. And so much of that is the timing. Like is it something they're interested in at that exact moment. Because if it's not, they don't care. David, do you want to talk a little bit about how you try to hit that intersection of getting to people when they care with the right message.
Sure so and in interdisciplinary environmental science, and probably to some extent in your world, too, what you're describing, I would call a policy window. It's at this moment policymakers are talking about that, this issue. It's possible to get something done. Now there's an open public comment period. Now there's open debate now. There wasn't a month ago.
There won't be in another month. So targeting things for when those are open is really important. But targeting specific audiences is absolutely vital. I mentioned this briefly in my talk last night that I was able to as part of my PhD research, get the state of Florida to change their shark fishing laws, and that protected critically endangered great hammerhead sharks, tens of thousands of which are alive now, that would not have been otherwise.
And I talked to everyone who would listen. I gave in one weekend. I gave a talk to a Florida Keys fishing club and a Florida Keys Greenpeace chapter. And those are real different audiences. And I had the same slides for both of them. But what I said was different, and knowing your knowing your audience and tailoring your message to your audience is vital, because you don't want people to think you're a crazy person.
You don't want people to think you're talking down to them. You don't want people to think, well, why am I here. I don't have any influence over this. So identifying your audience very specifically is really, really helpful. I think that's a great point too, that your message can be consistent, but what parts you're emphasizing can change based on who it is you're trying to reach.
Megan, I just want to give you the chance to mention policy pack, because I think that's a really interesting initiative focused on that kind of tailoring your message to your audience. Yeah so at science, I work on a team called the Science press package. And Zachary Graeber, one of the team members, it is here today. And we built something last year that we were excited about. We saw a report in 2023 that talked about policymakers, media habits and how they were changing.
And there wasn't a signal that more of them were watching lots more TV or listening to lots more talk radio. But there was a signal that on both sides, Democrat and Republican, they were getting more newsletters by outlets like Politico and Semafor, Semafor and Bloomberg. And we realized that we were reaching lots of science journalists, but we weren't reaching the journalists who were writing these newsletters that policymakers get every day.
And we thought we'd better try to change that. So one by one, we started reaching out to the editors at some of these outlets and saying, look, if we could curate every week a list of the science that we understand to be policy adjacent through some research we're going to do, we got to do a little study here. We'll talk to our Office of government relations or we'll call Laurel.
We did a little study if we could curate that for you, would you like to receive it every week. Would you use it. Might it inform the science stories you write. And we got buy in from 20 to 30 reporters. Zach helped with this and we built the policy pack. We launched it last year. We've been sending out policy adjacent science to reporters at these outlets.
And we've been seeing more stories in these outlets. And so our next step now is to understand if and how folks on the Hill are seeing and using the stories in the science studies underlying them. We've also got a so that version goes out under embargo to reporters. And we've also got a post embargo version that we're sending to folks on the Hill. So this is one way we've thought about bringing science to policymakers.
But timing matters, like you said, Laura. And we know that the interest that these folks will have depends on what's going on in their state. So as we continue to refine, we're going to try to dig into that a little bit, too, and tailor what we're offering. Thanks for a chance to share that. Yeah, I also think another thing that has come up a lot is how maybe like the personal touch is important.
Like it's David going to talk over and over again. I think a lot of staffers on the Hill in particular, they see something they want to learn more about, but they want to talk about whoever wrote it. It's not enough for them to just necessarily read the significance. They want to talk to the author. They want to get a sense of are they curious. Are they open to different interpretations, or do they just say, no, this is it.
And that's all I have to share with you, right. It looks like you have something to add. Well, well we're excited. We've got a briefing next month for state and local policymakers with one of our authors. She's going to be talking about hazard mitigation, land use, looking at building in floodplains or not, and giving some and highlighting some success stories of where when people have done this in certain states, it's really led to better outcomes in terms of losses after hurricanes and wildfires and things like that.
But she made an interesting point. So this is one researcher who's going to talk to 70 policymakers. And she said that she can do this because she's tenured and she has the time to go out and do this kind of impact oriented work that might be hard to make time for otherwise. And we're just so thankful. And we realize it's hard for researchers to make time for this.
But we think the relational piece of it, these policymakers, knowing they could reach out to her in the future, will be helpful, we hope, like you described, David. Yeah can I add to that. So back to this idea of trust in science. A lot of people are skeptical when science is communicated to them through a University PR person, but they're less skeptical when it's communicated to them by the researcher, especially decision makers and senior staff of decision makers who are constantly getting their ear chewed by someone.
So something like that will be hugely impactful, especially if the person comes off as credible, which I'm sure they will. After training and comes off like they really care about this. That's why you can't fake authenticity. Someone can be the world's leading expert in a subject, but act like they think it's kind of boring and people will not be that interested in it.
But I think this is interesting. I think this is important. Here's why that goes a long way. Yeah and trust in scientists. And I'm thinking again, we have the publisher's conference. What can publishers do right. In your workflow to support scientists who are publishing these papers. I think this is where to your earlier point about listening.
Ask yourself, when did you last talk to the scientists that are reading your journals. Have you asked them these questions. Do they want to. How do they want to participate in helping disseminate their work in accessible ways. And if you're trying to do these lay summaries, ask yourself, why. Because who's the audience here for your journals.
Are the non-experts coming to your journals. Even in the first place, are they coming. Are how are you tracking that. So there are little things you can do to listen. It's a very powerful thing you can do when you listen. You get so much information that allows you to approach in terms of designing training programs that you may come up with to support scientists in doing this work, to think more creatively.
I love what Figshare opportunity is. They're dissecting papers into little nuggets that make it more accessible for the non-experts. And by the way, scientists are also non-experts. If you are a physicist, you might not be an expert in some obscure neuroscience field. And so they're eager they're curious about trying to learn. There's lots of work right now trying to map the interests, the motivations for those who are seeking engagement.
And it's very diverse. They want to have fun. They want to learn, they're looking for things to do with their kids, right. So think creatively. Science museums are a huge component of the ecosystem. How are publishers engaging them. What are opportunities there right where you could work with science museums because they have a powerful access point to local communities.
So there are these little nuggets. I think if you start by listening first, you'll find yourself learning about all these multiple plug-in points that you as publishers, can take action in. So I just have one more want to pull on one more point and then we'll do audience questions. But, I think you brought up the visual representation of science.
At nature, we've been doing these videos that feature the open access science that we're publishing that have been extremely popular. People kind of just love these little visualizations. Megan, you had mentioned getting requests, I think. Yeah so thinking about the intersection of trust in science and visuals. Zach on our team does a lot of work to analyze the kinds of visuals that reporters at news outlets around the world big small digital print are wanting.
And we'd gotten an interesting feedback that I think is also relevant in the trust space we were publishing. We published robotics related research at the science family, and along the way, a reporter at the New Yorker said, it's great that these robotics papers have video, but we'd also like to see some video of the robots failing sometimes not being able to do the thing because I mean, isn't that part of how you get to the robot doing the thing.
And that will help us understand where robots are in their ability as compared to humans, and that helps us understand the process. And so maybe I'm not sure if there's an answer to the visuals that would be most important in the trust in science space, but we know visuals are incredibly important. Seeing is believing. Maybe seeing is also trusting and process.
Video showing the people at work and being themselves could be a powerful way in an increasingly visual landscape. Yeah anything you want to add something. Just a random thought came to mind and I had to share this. I was talking recently to a science communicator. He's a science communication scholar, and he was telling me he was teaching undergraduates. And he asked him, do you know what preprints are.
Now, these are undergraduates at an Ivy League University. I'm not going to say which one. And a whole bunch of them did not even know what preprints are. OK, now, these are undergraduates at an Ivy League institution. OK, so going back to publishers and what they can do. There's an opportunity here. You talked about process.
There's a process of science that it definitely we need more opportunities to share with non-experts what that entails. Every time you go to these trainings, scientists talk about what is that work like to get to that result. What did it take. But also the process of publishing the work itself is basically a black box to most people. And so there's an opportunity there to shine more light into that process.
The rigor that is in place to ensure that the review, the reviewers, the data and what happens to it. And now the big push on making sure that data is accessible. Open science and all of that. All of that is just a black box. And we need more initiatives. I think publishers can help there to provide opportunities to share this and shine light on this black box of publishing science.
Well, now I think I have more questions, but we'll open for audience questions. If anyone has anything they want to the mics right in the middle. So make your way up there. Hi all. I'm Tyler Beck from NCATS. I wanted to build off of what Doctor Wendy was saying about alternate forms of communication.
So I was just recently at a drug repurposing conference, and a group there designed a board game about the process of taking a drug through the drug repurposing pipeline. And it was extremely complex and way it was. It needed to be dumbed down for any audience outside of the people in the room. But it was a really interesting idea of is there something are there really, truly non-standard ways that we can get across to the public what it is that scientists do, how they do it, and the process.
So I thought it was really interesting. I'm going to throw a video games into the mix. I mean, this same researcher who's about to talk to 70 policymakers is a huge advocate for video games. And she told me in February, I could write a paper that 1,000 people might read if I'm lucky, but I could help design a video game that could explain, aspects of climate change that 5 million people might play.
And I just think the reach that video games have is incredible compared to research papers. She also talked about the importance of science fiction for opening people's minds in different ways to New ideas and approaches and ways that science could be helpful. And I think this is already happening. But she was an advocate for people reading more science fiction to absorb the ideas and open mindedness there and to consider solutions, let's say, around where we build our homes as climate is changing.
Science fiction could be presenting some ideas for the way communities could look that might ultimately be more helpful than, let's say, building seawalls along the Coast or something like that. So video games and science fiction, the board game sounds really cool too I would like to play that. Yeah, I'll say nature did a really cool photo exhibition in London that was scientists at work, and the idea was, it's not just people in a lab, it's people out in the field.
And it's women. It's women of color. It's a diverse it's not just just random guy holding a test tube all the time, which was really well received. And I think another way of showing the public like, look, this is what science can look like. It's not just the stereotype that you're used to thinking about anything.
David sorry. So there have been from Myspace and the ecology, wildlife science era. There have been three eras of public engagement with that. The first is scientists would go on these amazing adventures, and then we would talk to people about it at an evening with the scientists. Night at museums. The second, the one we're sort right in the middle of.
I just have to. I asked David for his bio and he was like, I'm sorry, I'm on a boat right now. I can't get this to you. So I'm sorry. In terms of amazing adventures, when you were on your boat trip and couldn't get back to us. Yeah so that that's phase 2 is we bring members of the public on these adventures with us.
So I bring thousands of members of the public out on Shark research expeditions in Florida. I can do this for your groups if you want a chat later. And people come out with us and they get to learn from experts, and they get to participate in the research and the data collection and learn of downstream effects from it. We have copies of papers that are already published on the research vessel and popular press coverage of it.
And the goal for some of this is we give members of the public the tools to go on their own adventures and collect data and report it back to us. Some fields have been better than that, better at that than others. I am not comfortable doing that with sharks, but there are some open exploration. Ocean exploration technology has come a long way. These remotely operated vehicles like Alvin, the famous one at Woods Hole cost like $30 million.
There's two of those in the world, but there's a new company called openrov, where people build their own ROV out of just commonly available tools. It can go down to about 500. It has a GoPro in it. It's a couple thousand dollars. Most universities can afford that. Some nerdy hobbyists can build that.
And then there's an online community of where are you going. How can we gather data, things like that. So there are lots of ways of doing this. And it need not all be sage on a stage lecture evening with a museum, evening with a scientist at a museum. A quick question for David. So do the public pay to participate in that. Yeah so there's two models that the lab that I work with uses.
The one that I was just doing when I was not able to respond to the questions was a fundraiser trip. So those are donors who support the lab's efforts. And that then what that funds is our ability to take low income school groups out in the future at no cost to them. So the University has relationships with some Miami School district schools and especially Title I low resource schools, so they don't have to pay anything.
We even pay for their bus and their bag lunch. But the money. We do a lot of these small group fundraisers to cover the cost of that. And it's something that came up on another panel I was on recently about, what are scientists doing about federal funding. This lab doesn't get federal funding. It's actually sometimes easier to get do some science education activity with public school students funding than it is to get do shark research funding and the people do funding.
The high school students out to do something don't care what it is. So some of the labs field research is funded by taking the students out. There are other groups that aren't Title I low resource schools that pay just the cost of using the boat for the day. Yeah, this is the funding piece. There is just super important that you know the funding cuts are happening for science, are ultimately affecting the science, communication, and engagement that takes place.
The NSF has the broader impact section that some of you may be familiar with and that has been impacted. So what will happen long term. We don't know yet. There are other programs at the NSF, the advancing informal STEM learning. That's another term, informal science, another term jargon to throw at you. And the NSF uses that term.
You won't see citizen science or anything like that. It's informal science education and that program hopefully will stay in place. I really hope so because it funds a lot of this work and they have a beautiful database. If you go to NSF, you can see what they've funded over the past 10, 15 years. It's really incredible across the US what they have funded. Quick factoid for you.
You were talking a little bit about citizen science. I think that's what you're describing there a little bit. Maybe not. Yeah not getting them to go look at sharks by themselves. Of course. Fun fact about I think Pew did this roughly, I think 14% of the US adults have ever conducted a citizen science sort of project. That means going out there and being collecting data for some study.
Tracking monarchs somewhere or for example, the billion oyster project in New York. It's a big, big, big citizen science project. 14% of US adults have done that. Huge opportunity to bring people to understand the process of science through participatory science. So organizations like scistarter, big database tracking these things, it's out there. Scistarter dawg.
You can go there today and see what they're tracking. So lots of opportunities for publishers to get involved. Lots of them. Other questions. We just answered everything. You guys are all oh go ahead. So I work for the American Society of Hematology, and we all have blood and that's great.
But sharks are a whole lot more fun. So there's an inherent challenge, I think, in what the majority of us here do in terms of working for small stem societies that aren't sharks. And I'm just curious, and we're not in nature, and we're not science and we're not Jama and we're not NEJM. We don't have the kind of money to do really fantastic videos. I'd love to do a great video showing blood moving all the way through and through the kidneys and everything.
Talk for a minute. Given the challenges that we face, we can't do all of these things. What do you think is also the institutional role. The institutions who hire and pay the scientists. What more can they be doing. And can we engage batter with the Institute or differently with the institutions. So in terms of limited funding, ways to produce really high quality graphics and videos for sometimes no cost at all is by partnering with local universities that have media studies, graphic design courses, because those students are having to make midterms and finals anyway, and sometimes they just make midterms and finals that are infographics or videos about just some random nonsense that just says, look, I know how to use this software correctly.
So our lab has partnered with an infographics class at the University, and it results in these amazingly high quality infographics. And the students are thrilled because then something they made for homework gets shown on a CNN article or something. So there are ways of leveraging resources in your community so that everybody wins. Not everything needs to be hiring a for hire, full time professional graphic designer that can be in my world for one infographic can be 10 grand.
There are ways of doing it, and I think you can also tap into the science communication community. In fact, I would encourage you to do that. They are eager. Yes, you can reach out, for example, the Association of science communicators, to ask. They have an annual conference. I just went to it back in March. Lots of wonderful people there.
A lot of graduate students that are eager to work and partner with organizations. So that way you don't have to reinvent the wheel right to if you lack capacity internally, you can tap into existing resources and they exist. Please trust me, they exist. It's a matter of asking and listening. Yeah, thanks for the question. It's something we think a lot about.
We publish a lot of basic research at the science family of journals in science signaling, science immunology and Science Translational medicine. Over the years, we've talked to reporters about some of this more basic research, and we've developed a list which we'd be happy to share with anyone who wants to reach out to me and ask.
It's a list of surprisingly newsworthy elements. So these would be aspects of research studies that might relate to a method that's been used, that hasn't been used in a long time, or that was newly developed, or an aspect of the collaboration and its international scope that was particularly interesting, or a personal story that informs why this research was done. Let's say a researcher. In one case, we had a very basic science signaling paper that was done by a researcher who'd been a lawyer and left their profession as a lawyer and got a PhD in cell biology because of an issue in their family, someone having developed an illness, and they wanted to learn more about it.
So we have a list, surprisingly newsworthy elements that institutions could ask their researchers to visit that you all, as your publishing papers could ask your researchers to visit. Are any of these applicable to your work. If so, we could tell a story about this, and it's something a reporter might be interested in. So that's one way we've tackled trying to elevate papers that aren't about sharks, which are pretty cool papers.
Great question. So we have about five minutes left. So I'm going to just give everyone a quick chance to say the last thing you want to leave everyone with. The most important thing about science communication we want to start with. So when I started doing science communication and as a master's student in 2008, a professional science communicator was not a job.
The people who were at these meetings were people who were scientists or museum staff or journalists who liked talking to the public about scientists on the side. Now there are master's programs in science communication. Now there are jobs for science communicators and things like that. Things have come a long way, but a lot of the basics are still the same.
And there's new ways of doing this that are happening all the time. It's all very exciting to see some of it is going to work, and it's going to change the face of the field. Some of it does not work, but it's still worth trying. It's been really cool to. What's been really amazing for me to see is when I first started doing this, other scientists were very skeptical of the idea that I actually got called out by the Dean of the Graduate School for, hey, I heard that you gave a talk at the museum last night.
Aren't we paying you to do research. Not this nonsense. And I pointed out to him that I had had three papers that year, and none of his students did, which I should not have said, but I was right. But nowadays people are saying, oh, that's great. Can you talk to me about how to do this better. So I am seeing progress. If people want to chat with me more later, I'm going to have to run right after this, because one of my nine jobs is I teach at o'clock PM downtown in DC.
But I am why sharks matter and happy to chat in the future about anything. That's a great story. OK, what we're thinking a lot about right now, I don't know if it's the most important thing, but it's most pressing on our minds at the science press package is for years we've reached a trained science journalists, and they've been telling stories about science.
And that's been going well. There are blips along the way, but that's been going well. But now we know that those stories are only reaching certain people, and there's a large percent of the population that gets stories about science or around scientists coming from other communicators. And we're not reaching those communicators, just like we weren't reaching the people who are reaching policymakers.
So we're starting to think about how to engage with content creators of different types who've got different senses about science, and we think we're going to have to do that slowly, one by one, instead of just going over to the New York times and saying, who's at the science desk now and getting a list of folks and registering them for the PSI pack, we think we're going to have to engage and ask how these folks are thinking about science, what they want to communicate, what their priorities are, and build relationships.
And we think relationships will probably be pretty important. So time requisite, but something we'll be focused on in the year ahead. Yeah so I'll end where I started. If you leave with this one idea for me, it'd be like success for me that the field is absolutely just is beautiful in terms of civic science and all the internal subfields that are in it and what's happening.
There is so much work that is happening every day right now as we speak. There's the PTSD conference in Scotland. We were just talking about that. All the people who geek out about this stuff, the practitioners or scholars are meeting there right now in Scotland. We met earlier in March, so there was a community already of people that are doing this work.
So for you as publishers and others in similar domains, you don't have to start from ground 0, you can absolutely reach out to these folk and start those conversations to see how they can help you in your targeted development of goals in this space. And so the field is beautiful. It's amazing. It's this wonderful organism that I get the chance to look at every day and meet awesome people like these.
So yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, everybody for coming. If you have questions, I think we can all stick around for a little bit, but really appreciate your time. Yes thank you.
Segment:0 .
All right. So hi everyone. I'm so happy to have you all here today. My name is Laura Patton and I'm the head of government affairs for the US at Springer Nature. I'm really excited about this topic. I think you've heard all of it come up in various themes throughout every session today.
I've worked on some form of translation of science to policy for my entire career, starting when I worked in Congress. I wrote the abstract for this session back in early November, which I think feels like a lifetime ago for many of us. But I think the events of the past few months have demonstrated that figuring out effective science communication is more important than ever. I think we've all heard a lot about how everyone needs to get better at science communication, and my goal for this panel, and I think we have a great group here today, is to really talk about the specifics of how that can be done.
So I'm going to run through introductions quickly, and then we'll get right to discussion. We'll leave plenty of time for audience questions at the end. So do start thinking if there's anything you want to cover. So first up is Doctor fanuel muindi, a professor of practice in civic science journalism in the Department of Communication studies at Northeastern University, where he leads the civic science Media Lab. His lab.
His lab is journalistically mapping the civic nature of science to make it more accessible and actionable for scientists, communicators, educators, funders, entrepreneurs, and community leaders. A neuroscientist by training, Doctor, muindi earned his bachelor's from Morehouse College, his PhD from Stanford, and completed postdoc work at the Department of Brain and Cognitive science is at MIT. Next to him is Megan Phelan, the communications director for the science family of journals, where she oversees efforts to boost the visibility of forthcoming science family of journal content for reporters worldwide.
Prior to joining ars in 2013, she served as a senior writer at air worldwide, where she interacted with more than 65 PhD level scientists and engineers to communicate advances in wind engineering, seismology, climate science, and other fields, and previously she was a senior writer at The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. And then finally, we have Doctor David Schiffman, who many of you heard yesterday at the opening keynote.
David has about eight jobs, and I'll just mention a few of them here. An ocean conservation scientist who studies sharks and how to protect them. A science journalist and an award winning public science educator. His words have appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, the Washington Post, and a monthly. Ask a marine biologist column in scuba diving magazine, and he is the author of Why sharks matter from Johns Hopkins University press.
So, as you can tell, we have a great, we have great experience here across many levels of science communication. But I thought we could start by taking a step back and starting with Phanuel. In one of our early discussions about this topic, he mentioned that public engagement actually has its own communications problem. So start with if you want to talk a little more about that.
Yeah Shirley, nice to see such a full room. I was thinking earlier that there might be no one here, but actually, this is great to see you all. So, yeah, I wanted to just Zoom out a little bit and share with you from my perch what I see normally what gets me excited. Is that when you think about science communication, it's part of a much even bigger landscape of what we call civic science.
So when you look at this field, there's terminology that is very, very diverse. You've got science communication, public engagement with science, public understanding of science, you've got citizen science. And that has been changing more recently to participatory science, for example, science outreach. All these terms mixed bag together of practitioners and scholars that are doing this work and approaching it from multiple angles.
And you saw a little bit as well from David's talk yesterday. And that's what really gets me going. I'm a trained neuroscientist, and if you look within neuroscientists, there's some absolutely amazing work that is taking place at the intersection of neuroscience and society. Another term that is being used. And as well, I wanted to add, there is a field, a whole field called the Science of science communication, a whole journal dedicated to it as well.
That is there. And insights are coming out almost by the dozen load every day, new papers that are coming out about the ongoing work, what we're learning, what doesn't work, what is working. And here comes the problem. And this is the piece that I wrote in nature where I'm like, wow, there is so much taking place. We have this iceberg effect that there's this gap between scholarship and practice, and that is pointed at the lack of communication, more communication about the work that is taking place.
So every time I see someone like David giving a talk, I get absolutely excited. I'm like, wow, I want to learn more about what you're doing and most importantly, what you're learning. And so throughout this conversation, I hope to share a little bit of those insights, because what we spend in my lab doing all year long, hundreds or so interviews, is talking to people like David and asking them, what are you learning.
What are you doing. Actually, most importantly, what are you doing. What are you doing. David and I was like, wow, that is so cool. More people should know about it. Most importantly, what are you learning from that work. And we need more of that. And I hope today's conversation does that. So I also do have a note.
You talked about the deficit engagement model. I'm just going to prompt you to talk a little more about that. Yeah and David also talked about this yesterday too right. And this idea that the belief in the increase in knowledge will lead to the support of science. There's something missing in the non-expert public that we need to plug that hole. And there's been tons and tons of data showing that actually that's not the entire story that you can't just stop there.
It's It's necessary to inform, but it's not sufficient. That's the way I like to think, as a biologist. And so one example I think, was cited even this morning about if you look back in the 50s or 60s with the launch of Sputnik and the US moon landings. Here's a fun fact. At that time, science was heavily supported. There was a lot of support for science at that time. Science literacy, though, was actually not that high.
It was pretty low 30% knew or thought that the moon was smaller or was smaller than the Earth. Only 38% knew that. So there was still a lot of that gap, but yet there was still a lot of support for science. But here's the kicker. There is still a lot of deficit model engagement that is still out there right now. A lot of it.
And I'm sure David can share some examples. So we see a lot of models that are coming out, people who will continue to share, hey, bidirectional engagement is really where the work is. The question is, how do you do that. And that's where I hope some of you are here to hear about some examples of that. But yeah, the deficit type of thinking is still prevalent unfortunately.
And that is preventing us from truly engaging. For moving beyond just communication to engagement. Do you guys want to add. So we have our own. We have a communication problem in science communication. That's the question. OK I was getting excited about what you were saying.
Yeah I think it's definitely true. I think being at places like SSP and you all being open to hear about new things that we're trying and maybe still learning about, which I want to talk about today, is a really important process in spreading the word about things that maybe we could improve with input you all have. So I'll be talking about some of those today.
Yeah, I absolutely agree that science communication has a communication problem that so many of my professional researcher colleagues misused the term that they just straight up don't know what. Science communication is. Or they say, oh, of course, I engage in science communication. I published in this journal or I presented at this conference to 12 the 12 other people who understand what the title of my talk means.
That's not what we mean. And so many academic leadership people don't value this enough that I mentioned in the Q&A of my talk yesterday that so many of my colleagues who are full time academics, I'm actually at nine jobs now. So, so many of my colleagues who are full time academics, they have to do this stuff on the side in addition to their other. It's the joke in academia is you have so much freedom.
You can choose which 80 hours a week you work. So they have to do this stuff on the side, and it doesn't count towards the tenure promotion hiring stuff. So I think a lot of this corresponds with trust in science. How it's communicated, how people are thinking about it. I know that that's something Megan has in particular been thinking about at science. Is there any kind of initiatives or anything you want to share that worked or didn't work.
Things you've changed. Yeah so five things here, but each I can hit on pretty quickly. So thinking about how trust in science plays into effective science communication, like you said Daniel, the deficit model, just explaining what a research paper says isn't really so powerful anymore. There are a couple other things we've been thinking about at the science family journals.
When we're working with researchers to share their new results with the public. And the first is to be willing to get into what that paper says and what it doesn't say, and to be able to articulate the latter pretty clearly. This is what we know and this is what we don't. We had a press briefing last year on chlorinating water, and a revelation about a byproduct of that really important process that might lead to toxicity.
There was a signal that it was possible, but it wasn't yet a certainty. And we had some researchers do a really good job and come out and say, we want to tell you about this. Now, it may be something, but it might not be. And they answered many questions, many of the same questions about the potential health problem that research could pave the way to. And it might not.
And they did it patiently. They did it using answers in different forms. And it resulted in a lot of good press coverage about what was true and what wasn't in that paper. So researchers saying what they do know and what they don't is really important. Also, researchers being able to engage with people in their field who might have a slightly different view of something, but being willing to engage in front of reporters on that topic to show that they don't have an agenda, but ultimately, they want to get to the truth, is something that we are exploring right now with researchers on different papers that exhibit slightly different signals and something that we're excited about.
And we're also encouraging researchers to respond to press when they have questions about research integrity related aspects of their work. And we've given we've built some tips and tools that they could use to do this. This is not an easy thing to do, but we've built up some tips and tools that could help them in this process, because this could be a moment to build trust as well, and to explain the process of science, and to help build public understanding about how hard it is to do some of this work, and where errors can happen naturally.
And I guess the last thing is just to always be open to people's questions. Some of the press briefings we hold with researchers, they might get the same question in a couple different forms, but that means there's really a signal there, a curiosity. And so it's important to think about answering maybe in different ways or inviting different among your co-authors to answer using their different expertise.
Anything you guys want to add. Just a word about trust. It's used a lot and thrown around very, very heavily. And I just wanted to share with you that it's a loaded term and it means different things to different people. And so when you are saying my goal is to build trust in mind, you trust in science is different to trust in scientists. And so when the Pew shares their data, be careful what you're talking about.
Trust in scientists, the people. There was a study that just came out in Nature, no longer nature behavior. I believe human behavior. And that looked at trust in scientists across 68 countries. Turns out it's actually pretty high. And even the Pew results show it has gone down for sure due to COVID, but it's still pretty much higher than pretty much all the other fields that they looked at.
And that part of the story is always missing from this conversation. And for me, when I see that we have to be asking more specific questions, what about trust. Are you trying to address in science. Is it the perceived competence of scientists, the benevolence? These are actual dimensions that these studies look at integrity, openness, the willingness to listen. And so as publishers, we had a publisher publishers conference.
I think there are some things you can do as publishers. There's one example I know there's a question we're going to talk about later, but PNAS, for example, has a significant section that I found really fascinating. When you have an additional area where the authors write, not even layman's terms, but right in more accessible terms, trying to describe what was found, what was significant about the results.
Another journal, the Journal of science, policy and governance. They actually host trainings for some of their authors to write these op eds, these science policy op eds that are out there. So I think journal publishers can provide some trainings. And I know science and other places do provide that for scientists. But keep in mind that there's multiple ways to engage the public.
Public speaking is just one of these things that you can do. Writing but there is so much more and the diversity is absolutely insane, I'm telling you. And I spent most of my time talking to people who are doing this work, and there's always new ways people can do this. And funders are looking for innovative ways that they can support ideas to support ideas for scientists, science communicators, collaborations between journals in science communicators.
I think there's avenues there that could be tapped into existing expertise, that we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We actually don't need to reinvent the wheel. So I think one of the most interesting parts of that, too, is who you're trying to communicate with. And, David, I think you got to this a little bit yesterday, but it's not is it the public, is it policymakers, is it the media.
Is it your fellow academics. And what you're communicating changes when as government affairs, I think most about communicating with policymakers. And so much of that is the timing. Like is it something they're interested in at that exact moment. Because if it's not, they don't care. David, do you want to talk a little bit about how you try to hit that intersection of getting to people when they care with the right message.
Sure so and in interdisciplinary environmental science, and probably to some extent in your world, too, what you're describing, I would call a policy window. It's at this moment policymakers are talking about that, this issue. It's possible to get something done. Now there's an open public comment period. Now there's open debate now. There wasn't a month ago.
There won't be in another month. So targeting things for when those are open is really important. But targeting specific audiences is absolutely vital. I mentioned this briefly in my talk last night that I was able to as part of my PhD research, get the state of Florida to change their shark fishing laws, and that protected critically endangered great hammerhead sharks, tens of thousands of which are alive now, that would not have been otherwise.
And I talked to everyone who would listen. I gave in one weekend. I gave a talk to a Florida Keys fishing club and a Florida Keys Greenpeace chapter. And those are real different audiences. And I had the same slides for both of them. But what I said was different, and knowing your knowing your audience and tailoring your message to your audience is vital, because you don't want people to think you're a crazy person.
You don't want people to think you're talking down to them. You don't want people to think, well, why am I here. I don't have any influence over this. So identifying your audience very specifically is really, really helpful. I think that's a great point too, that your message can be consistent, but what parts you're emphasizing can change based on who it is you're trying to reach.
Megan, I just want to give you the chance to mention policy pack, because I think that's a really interesting initiative focused on that kind of tailoring your message to your audience. Yeah so at science, I work on a team called the Science press package. And Zachary Graeber, one of the team members, it is here today. And we built something last year that we were excited about. We saw a report in 2023 that talked about policymakers, media habits and how they were changing.
And there wasn't a signal that more of them were watching lots more TV or listening to lots more talk radio. But there was a signal that on both sides, Democrat and Republican, they were getting more newsletters by outlets like Politico and Semafor, Semafor and Bloomberg. And we realized that we were reaching lots of science journalists, but we weren't reaching the journalists who were writing these newsletters that policymakers get every day.
And we thought we'd better try to change that. So one by one, we started reaching out to the editors at some of these outlets and saying, look, if we could curate every week a list of the science that we understand to be policy adjacent through some research we're going to do, we got to do a little study here. We'll talk to our Office of government relations or we'll call Laurel.
We did a little study if we could curate that for you, would you like to receive it every week. Would you use it. Might it inform the science stories you write. And we got buy in from 20 to 30 reporters. Zach helped with this and we built the policy pack. We launched it last year. We've been sending out policy adjacent science to reporters at these outlets.
And we've been seeing more stories in these outlets. And so our next step now is to understand if and how folks on the Hill are seeing and using the stories in the science studies underlying them. We've also got a so that version goes out under embargo to reporters. And we've also got a post embargo version that we're sending to folks on the Hill. So this is one way we've thought about bringing science to policymakers.
But timing matters, like you said, Laura. And we know that the interest that these folks will have depends on what's going on in their state. So as we continue to refine, we're going to try to dig into that a little bit, too, and tailor what we're offering. Thanks for a chance to share that. Yeah, I also think another thing that has come up a lot is how maybe like the personal touch is important.
Like it's David going to talk over and over again. I think a lot of staffers on the Hill in particular, they see something they want to learn more about, but they want to talk about whoever wrote it. It's not enough for them to just necessarily read the significance. They want to talk to the author. They want to get a sense of are they curious. Are they open to different interpretations, or do they just say, no, this is it.
And that's all I have to share with you, right. It looks like you have something to add. Well, well we're excited. We've got a briefing next month for state and local policymakers with one of our authors. She's going to be talking about hazard mitigation, land use, looking at building in floodplains or not, and giving some and highlighting some success stories of where when people have done this in certain states, it's really led to better outcomes in terms of losses after hurricanes and wildfires and things like that.
But she made an interesting point. So this is one researcher who's going to talk to 70 policymakers. And she said that she can do this because she's tenured and she has the time to go out and do this kind of impact oriented work that might be hard to make time for otherwise. And we're just so thankful. And we realize it's hard for researchers to make time for this.
But we think the relational piece of it, these policymakers, knowing they could reach out to her in the future, will be helpful, we hope, like you described, David. Yeah can I add to that. So back to this idea of trust in science. A lot of people are skeptical when science is communicated to them through a University PR person, but they're less skeptical when it's communicated to them by the researcher, especially decision makers and senior staff of decision makers who are constantly getting their ear chewed by someone.
So something like that will be hugely impactful, especially if the person comes off as credible, which I'm sure they will. After training and comes off like they really care about this. That's why you can't fake authenticity. Someone can be the world's leading expert in a subject, but act like they think it's kind of boring and people will not be that interested in it.
But I think this is interesting. I think this is important. Here's why that goes a long way. Yeah and trust in scientists. And I'm thinking again, we have the publisher's conference. What can publishers do right. In your workflow to support scientists who are publishing these papers. I think this is where to your earlier point about listening.
Ask yourself, when did you last talk to the scientists that are reading your journals. Have you asked them these questions. Do they want to. How do they want to participate in helping disseminate their work in accessible ways. And if you're trying to do these lay summaries, ask yourself, why. Because who's the audience here for your journals.
Are the non-experts coming to your journals. Even in the first place, are they coming. Are how are you tracking that. So there are little things you can do to listen. It's a very powerful thing you can do when you listen. You get so much information that allows you to approach in terms of designing training programs that you may come up with to support scientists in doing this work, to think more creatively.
I love what Figshare opportunity is. They're dissecting papers into little nuggets that make it more accessible for the non-experts. And by the way, scientists are also non-experts. If you are a physicist, you might not be an expert in some obscure neuroscience field. And so they're eager they're curious about trying to learn. There's lots of work right now trying to map the interests, the motivations for those who are seeking engagement.
And it's very diverse. They want to have fun. They want to learn, they're looking for things to do with their kids, right. So think creatively. Science museums are a huge component of the ecosystem. How are publishers engaging them. What are opportunities there right where you could work with science museums because they have a powerful access point to local communities.
So there are these little nuggets. I think if you start by listening first, you'll find yourself learning about all these multiple plug-in points that you as publishers, can take action in. So I just have one more want to pull on one more point and then we'll do audience questions. But, I think you brought up the visual representation of science.
At nature, we've been doing these videos that feature the open access science that we're publishing that have been extremely popular. People kind of just love these little visualizations. Megan, you had mentioned getting requests, I think. Yeah so thinking about the intersection of trust in science and visuals. Zach on our team does a lot of work to analyze the kinds of visuals that reporters at news outlets around the world big small digital print are wanting.
And we'd gotten an interesting feedback that I think is also relevant in the trust space we were publishing. We published robotics related research at the science family, and along the way, a reporter at the New Yorker said, it's great that these robotics papers have video, but we'd also like to see some video of the robots failing sometimes not being able to do the thing because I mean, isn't that part of how you get to the robot doing the thing.
And that will help us understand where robots are in their ability as compared to humans, and that helps us understand the process. And so maybe I'm not sure if there's an answer to the visuals that would be most important in the trust in science space, but we know visuals are incredibly important. Seeing is believing. Maybe seeing is also trusting and process.
Video showing the people at work and being themselves could be a powerful way in an increasingly visual landscape. Yeah anything you want to add something. Just a random thought came to mind and I had to share this. I was talking recently to a science communicator. He's a science communication scholar, and he was telling me he was teaching undergraduates. And he asked him, do you know what preprints are.
Now, these are undergraduates at an Ivy League University. I'm not going to say which one. And a whole bunch of them did not even know what preprints are. OK, now, these are undergraduates at an Ivy League institution. OK, so going back to publishers and what they can do. There's an opportunity here. You talked about process.
There's a process of science that it definitely we need more opportunities to share with non-experts what that entails. Every time you go to these trainings, scientists talk about what is that work like to get to that result. What did it take. But also the process of publishing the work itself is basically a black box to most people. And so there's an opportunity there to shine more light into that process.
The rigor that is in place to ensure that the review, the reviewers, the data and what happens to it. And now the big push on making sure that data is accessible. Open science and all of that. All of that is just a black box. And we need more initiatives. I think publishers can help there to provide opportunities to share this and shine light on this black box of publishing science.
Well, now I think I have more questions, but we'll open for audience questions. If anyone has anything they want to the mics right in the middle. So make your way up there. Hi all. I'm Tyler Beck from NCATS. I wanted to build off of what Doctor Wendy was saying about alternate forms of communication.
So I was just recently at a drug repurposing conference, and a group there designed a board game about the process of taking a drug through the drug repurposing pipeline. And it was extremely complex and way it was. It needed to be dumbed down for any audience outside of the people in the room. But it was a really interesting idea of is there something are there really, truly non-standard ways that we can get across to the public what it is that scientists do, how they do it, and the process.
So I thought it was really interesting. I'm going to throw a video games into the mix. I mean, this same researcher who's about to talk to 70 policymakers is a huge advocate for video games. And she told me in February, I could write a paper that 1,000 people might read if I'm lucky, but I could help design a video game that could explain, aspects of climate change that 5 million people might play.
And I just think the reach that video games have is incredible compared to research papers. She also talked about the importance of science fiction for opening people's minds in different ways to New ideas and approaches and ways that science could be helpful. And I think this is already happening. But she was an advocate for people reading more science fiction to absorb the ideas and open mindedness there and to consider solutions, let's say, around where we build our homes as climate is changing.
Science fiction could be presenting some ideas for the way communities could look that might ultimately be more helpful than, let's say, building seawalls along the Coast or something like that. So video games and science fiction, the board game sounds really cool too I would like to play that. Yeah, I'll say nature did a really cool photo exhibition in London that was scientists at work, and the idea was, it's not just people in a lab, it's people out in the field.
And it's women. It's women of color. It's a diverse it's not just just random guy holding a test tube all the time, which was really well received. And I think another way of showing the public like, look, this is what science can look like. It's not just the stereotype that you're used to thinking about anything.
David sorry. So there have been from Myspace and the ecology, wildlife science era. There have been three eras of public engagement with that. The first is scientists would go on these amazing adventures, and then we would talk to people about it at an evening with the scientists. Night at museums. The second, the one we're sort right in the middle of.
I just have to. I asked David for his bio and he was like, I'm sorry, I'm on a boat right now. I can't get this to you. So I'm sorry. In terms of amazing adventures, when you were on your boat trip and couldn't get back to us. Yeah so that that's phase 2 is we bring members of the public on these adventures with us.
So I bring thousands of members of the public out on Shark research expeditions in Florida. I can do this for your groups if you want a chat later. And people come out with us and they get to learn from experts, and they get to participate in the research and the data collection and learn of downstream effects from it. We have copies of papers that are already published on the research vessel and popular press coverage of it.
And the goal for some of this is we give members of the public the tools to go on their own adventures and collect data and report it back to us. Some fields have been better than that, better at that than others. I am not comfortable doing that with sharks, but there are some open exploration. Ocean exploration technology has come a long way. These remotely operated vehicles like Alvin, the famous one at Woods Hole cost like $30 million.
There's two of those in the world, but there's a new company called openrov, where people build their own ROV out of just commonly available tools. It can go down to about 500. It has a GoPro in it. It's a couple thousand dollars. Most universities can afford that. Some nerdy hobbyists can build that.
And then there's an online community of where are you going. How can we gather data, things like that. So there are lots of ways of doing this. And it need not all be sage on a stage lecture evening with a museum, evening with a scientist at a museum. A quick question for David. So do the public pay to participate in that. Yeah so there's two models that the lab that I work with uses.
The one that I was just doing when I was not able to respond to the questions was a fundraiser trip. So those are donors who support the lab's efforts. And that then what that funds is our ability to take low income school groups out in the future at no cost to them. So the University has relationships with some Miami School district schools and especially Title I low resource schools, so they don't have to pay anything.
We even pay for their bus and their bag lunch. But the money. We do a lot of these small group fundraisers to cover the cost of that. And it's something that came up on another panel I was on recently about, what are scientists doing about federal funding. This lab doesn't get federal funding. It's actually sometimes easier to get do some science education activity with public school students funding than it is to get do shark research funding and the people do funding.
The high school students out to do something don't care what it is. So some of the labs field research is funded by taking the students out. There are other groups that aren't Title I low resource schools that pay just the cost of using the boat for the day. Yeah, this is the funding piece. There is just super important that you know the funding cuts are happening for science, are ultimately affecting the science, communication, and engagement that takes place.
The NSF has the broader impact section that some of you may be familiar with and that has been impacted. So what will happen long term. We don't know yet. There are other programs at the NSF, the advancing informal STEM learning. That's another term, informal science, another term jargon to throw at you. And the NSF uses that term.
You won't see citizen science or anything like that. It's informal science education and that program hopefully will stay in place. I really hope so because it funds a lot of this work and they have a beautiful database. If you go to NSF, you can see what they've funded over the past 10, 15 years. It's really incredible across the US what they have funded. Quick factoid for you.
You were talking a little bit about citizen science. I think that's what you're describing there a little bit. Maybe not. Yeah not getting them to go look at sharks by themselves. Of course. Fun fact about I think Pew did this roughly, I think 14% of the US adults have ever conducted a citizen science sort of project. That means going out there and being collecting data for some study.
Tracking monarchs somewhere or for example, the billion oyster project in New York. It's a big, big, big citizen science project. 14% of US adults have done that. Huge opportunity to bring people to understand the process of science through participatory science. So organizations like scistarter, big database tracking these things, it's out there. Scistarter dawg.
You can go there today and see what they're tracking. So lots of opportunities for publishers to get involved. Lots of them. Other questions. We just answered everything. You guys are all oh go ahead. So I work for the American Society of Hematology, and we all have blood and that's great.
But sharks are a whole lot more fun. So there's an inherent challenge, I think, in what the majority of us here do in terms of working for small stem societies that aren't sharks. And I'm just curious, and we're not in nature, and we're not science and we're not Jama and we're not NEJM. We don't have the kind of money to do really fantastic videos. I'd love to do a great video showing blood moving all the way through and through the kidneys and everything.
Talk for a minute. Given the challenges that we face, we can't do all of these things. What do you think is also the institutional role. The institutions who hire and pay the scientists. What more can they be doing. And can we engage batter with the Institute or differently with the institutions. So in terms of limited funding, ways to produce really high quality graphics and videos for sometimes no cost at all is by partnering with local universities that have media studies, graphic design courses, because those students are having to make midterms and finals anyway, and sometimes they just make midterms and finals that are infographics or videos about just some random nonsense that just says, look, I know how to use this software correctly.
So our lab has partnered with an infographics class at the University, and it results in these amazingly high quality infographics. And the students are thrilled because then something they made for homework gets shown on a CNN article or something. So there are ways of leveraging resources in your community so that everybody wins. Not everything needs to be hiring a for hire, full time professional graphic designer that can be in my world for one infographic can be 10 grand.
There are ways of doing it, and I think you can also tap into the science communication community. In fact, I would encourage you to do that. They are eager. Yes, you can reach out, for example, the Association of science communicators, to ask. They have an annual conference. I just went to it back in March. Lots of wonderful people there.
A lot of graduate students that are eager to work and partner with organizations. So that way you don't have to reinvent the wheel right to if you lack capacity internally, you can tap into existing resources and they exist. Please trust me, they exist. It's a matter of asking and listening. Yeah, thanks for the question. It's something we think a lot about.
We publish a lot of basic research at the science family of journals in science signaling, science immunology and Science Translational medicine. Over the years, we've talked to reporters about some of this more basic research, and we've developed a list which we'd be happy to share with anyone who wants to reach out to me and ask.
It's a list of surprisingly newsworthy elements. So these would be aspects of research studies that might relate to a method that's been used, that hasn't been used in a long time, or that was newly developed, or an aspect of the collaboration and its international scope that was particularly interesting, or a personal story that informs why this research was done. Let's say a researcher. In one case, we had a very basic science signaling paper that was done by a researcher who'd been a lawyer and left their profession as a lawyer and got a PhD in cell biology because of an issue in their family, someone having developed an illness, and they wanted to learn more about it.
So we have a list, surprisingly newsworthy elements that institutions could ask their researchers to visit that you all, as your publishing papers could ask your researchers to visit. Are any of these applicable to your work. If so, we could tell a story about this, and it's something a reporter might be interested in. So that's one way we've tackled trying to elevate papers that aren't about sharks, which are pretty cool papers.
Great question. So we have about five minutes left. So I'm going to just give everyone a quick chance to say the last thing you want to leave everyone with. The most important thing about science communication we want to start with. So when I started doing science communication and as a master's student in 2008, a professional science communicator was not a job.
The people who were at these meetings were people who were scientists or museum staff or journalists who liked talking to the public about scientists on the side. Now there are master's programs in science communication. Now there are jobs for science communicators and things like that. Things have come a long way, but a lot of the basics are still the same.
And there's new ways of doing this that are happening all the time. It's all very exciting to see some of it is going to work, and it's going to change the face of the field. Some of it does not work, but it's still worth trying. It's been really cool to. What's been really amazing for me to see is when I first started doing this, other scientists were very skeptical of the idea that I actually got called out by the Dean of the Graduate School for, hey, I heard that you gave a talk at the museum last night.
Aren't we paying you to do research. Not this nonsense. And I pointed out to him that I had had three papers that year, and none of his students did, which I should not have said, but I was right. But nowadays people are saying, oh, that's great. Can you talk to me about how to do this better. So I am seeing progress. If people want to chat with me more later, I'm going to have to run right after this, because one of my nine jobs is I teach at o'clock PM downtown in DC.
But I am why sharks matter and happy to chat in the future about anything. That's a great story. OK, what we're thinking a lot about right now, I don't know if it's the most important thing, but it's most pressing on our minds at the science press package is for years we've reached a trained science journalists, and they've been telling stories about science.
And that's been going well. There are blips along the way, but that's been going well. But now we know that those stories are only reaching certain people, and there's a large percent of the population that gets stories about science or around scientists coming from other communicators. And we're not reaching those communicators, just like we weren't reaching the people who are reaching policymakers.
So we're starting to think about how to engage with content creators of different types who've got different senses about science, and we think we're going to have to do that slowly, one by one, instead of just going over to the New York times and saying, who's at the science desk now and getting a list of folks and registering them for the PSI pack, we think we're going to have to engage and ask how these folks are thinking about science, what they want to communicate, what their priorities are, and build relationships.
And we think relationships will probably be pretty important. So time requisite, but something we'll be focused on in the year ahead. Yeah so I'll end where I started. If you leave with this one idea for me, it'd be like success for me that the field is absolutely just is beautiful in terms of civic science and all the internal subfields that are in it and what's happening.
There is so much work that is happening every day right now as we speak. There's the PTSD conference in Scotland. We were just talking about that. All the people who geek out about this stuff, the practitioners or scholars are meeting there right now in Scotland. We met earlier in March, so there was a community already of people that are doing this work.
So for you as publishers and others in similar domains, you don't have to start from ground 0, you can absolutely reach out to these folk and start those conversations to see how they can help you in your targeted development of goals in this space. And so the field is beautiful. It's amazing. It's this wonderful organism that I get the chance to look at every day and meet awesome people like these.
So yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, everybody for coming. If you have questions, I think we can all stick around for a little bit, but really appreciate your time. Yes thank you.
Form Title Download
Transcript
Form Title Bookmark
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Share
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
-
You Size - Responsive
-
We Size - Responsive
-
Picture Overlay Popup
-
400 x 225
-
512 x 288
-
400 x 700
-
768 x 1024
-
1024 x 512
-
1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode