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Alternative Communication Formats—Bridging the Last Mile
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Alternative Communication Formats—Bridging the Last Mile
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Segment:0 .
Good morning and Thank you for joining us for today's discussion. Alternative communication formats bridging the last mile. The first event in SSP's 2023 webinar series. I'm Jason point meet of the FASB education committees webinars working group.
Before we get started, I want to thank SSPS 2023 education program sponsors murcia, silverchair, 67 bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000. We're grateful for their support. I also have a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with panelists and other participants.
This one hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's event. A quick note on SSP'S code of conduct and today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity and providing a safe, inclusive and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner.
Please visit our website using a QR code on the screen to read the full code of conduct. At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback to help us shape future spe programming. Now it's my pleasure to introduce the moderator for today's discussion. Alexa Colella.
Huh? Thank you, Jason. I'm Alexis Cole, and I am a product manager of professional services at Research Square. And part of my product suite includes research communication services, which informs my interest in this topic. I'm going to go ahead and let the panelists introduce themselves. I'm going to start with jay, who's to my left here.
Hello Thank you very much. Happy to be a part of this panel. I'm Jay Patel with cactus communications. I work on everything from science communications to AI and mobile applications and finding ways to get researchers access to information that they need when and where they need it. It's great to be here.
Thank you, Debbie. Your next. Hi, everyone. My name is Deborah Rowe and I work with HSC, the higher education sustainability initiative. And in there we have an action group that I co-founded and co-chair called the SDG publishers compact Fellows program.
We meet every week working on how we can make the world of academic publishing even better and more relevant to making the world a better place via the sustainable development goals. So but. Morning I'm Blythe Thomas. I'm with 1,000 days. We are a nonprofit organization focused on that precious time between pregnancy and a baby's second birthday, where the brain grows the fastest and where nutrition especially is important for the best outcomes for the momma and the child.
So it's great to be here. Thanks Thank you. And Kira. Hi my name is Kara Metzl. I'm the director of development for annual reviews. We are a 501 nonprofit scholarly publisher. We publish 51 journals in the sciences and social sciences, and as of almost five years ago, we launched knowable magazine, a general public interest Science Magazine with science journalism through the Creative Commons license.
Thank you so much. So we've got a really interesting conversation coming. I'm going to just go ahead and get started. So that we can fit it all in and have time for some questions. So the first thing that I wanted to talk about is that the conversation we're having is about how to talk about research, research, communication and taking research the last mile once it's published.
Where does it go and what do we do with it? And I think the first thing that's really important to this discussion is to talk about why we do this. What what is the point? What is our why? And one of the things that's really interesting about open access is that it has made everybody a consumer of research.
So let's talk about what that means. I'm going to start with you, jay, again, if you don't mind going first. Yes I mean, open access has been really great for spreading information faster, especially research and science information to more people. It's really broken down barriers that existed before, which were, you know, we can't print something somewhere.
We can't ship something somewhere. As long as you have access to the internet now, you can access open access content. But at the same time, it's also informed us that we need to do a better job actually communicating that content, just not publish it and throw it out there and hopefully the right people find it. But it's really about that. We also need to focus on communicating it.
Exactly Debbie, what about you next? Yeah so I just got off the phone this morning actually with the CEO of a publisher. And we have in our weekly meetings, weekly conversations about what are the business models that we need to close, the gaps between the academic research that's there and the practitioners and the policymakers, and the public that need to read it.
So while open access is exciting and definitely a piece of it, I really think there's a whole lot of other pieces. It's not just me, it's a whole bunch of people, right? From both the academic side and from the practitioner policymaker side. There's a whole there's a big gap there that we are working to fill in. So that academic research, number one, is on topics that are of use to the practitioners and the policymakers at this very urgent time when we need to reduce, for example, greenhouse gases by 50% by 2030, if we want to have a shot at stabilizing climate and that we have a lot of the science out there, we have the technologies, it's already cost effective, but that doesn't mean it's happening at the pace that we need.
In fact, it's clearly not. So how do we get useful research agendas? How do we get the outcomes of that and plain language summaries and bullet points to the policymakers and to the practitioners who need it, and also to the public who are going to create that market demand. And we'll also, if they're in a democracy or something like it, elect policymakers who will not obstruct these solutions, not just for climate, which is so very, very urgent, but for all of the sustainable development goals, so excited about open access.
But it's not nearly enough. Yeah Kerry, I think have some interesting things to add to that point. You need. Now I'm not. So I'm going to share my screen very briefly. To show a slide that we developed. This was a couple of years ago.
I'm not going to go over the bullet points, but I think these are the sorts of things that we've been discussing. What I really want to point out is that the reason we developed this slide is because. See we'll do slide number two. We have a change in our mission. About five years ago, it used to just stop at four the progress of science and then we added and the benefit of society.
So much of what I'll be talking today, talking about today involves what we've tried to do to actualize those five additional words. I'm going to draw in the chart. Some information about our Subscribe to open model, which is our open access funding model. But I also want to add that when we've been thinking about how we want to share the information that we Steward, we're not only focusing on sharing the research itself, but the systems and processes that really lead to the development of that research.
In other words, how scientists come to know what they know. Our primary vehicle for doing this is through knowable magazine, but we have others as well. And we think that this is really critical because, of course, combating misinformation and disinformation is something that we all care deeply about, but we also want to build trust in these institutions. And fields that are really providing this critical information that we should all find actionable in some way or another.
Awesome Thank you. So one thing that came up in our kind of initial discussions was how important it is to combat misinformation and disinformation. And I know that this is a really critical thing for parents. And so you can tell me a little bit about your why, just because as a parent, I know that if I get on Instagram and try and find out information about parenting, it is a disaster zone.
I know it can be so confusing. And I think that level of misinformation and disinformation, you know, I know we're going to talk a little more, too, about trusted messengers, which I think is really important for us to dial it to dialogue about. But also just, you know, when I was first approached about this, I thought, what is the why? I think first I want to just acknowledge where we are right now in terms of our health of our moms and babies and toddlers.
You know, the Uc ranks among the worst of our peers on key child health metrics, where one in 10 babies is born too early, one in six babies is never breastfed. Workers are not guaranteed paid leave, which jeopardizes the ability for so many parents to care for themselves and their children. And people really struggle today. Too many families are struggling to put nutritious food on the table.
So for me, why is because I am so grateful for the information that you all publish. You are bringing facts, data, science, research, most up to date information forward. But we have to get it to the families so they can use it. And that's why it's really important for us. I think another thing that we'll talk a little bit about today is just sort of the different mediums it used to be, gosh, I miss these days where the news, the media was a primary source of really good information where you could go and learn and be informed about what's happening around you.
Today, the latest in the Trust Barometer. Only about one third of Americans actually trust what they hear on the news. So the need for us to bring research and data and science and to be sharing it through multiple mediums, we can't just rely on the news. I think all of that's going to be really important to talk through today and to make sure that we're breaking through and trying some new practices to get the information out there.
Yeah, that's a really excellent point. I think we all agree that it's very important to communicate about research. The research that is published is very critical to this world. However, we don't really know how to do this or we do know, but there's lots of different methods and we don't always get it right. So if we could talk about how we do this, how we manage this, it's probably different for every field, every discipline, every use case.
So I'm going to start with. Debbie for this one, if you could, go ahead and start. Start us out. I have to tell you that you glitched out a little bit. I apologize. I don't know what's going on my internet stable all day. Just say that one question again, because I have answers to the different questions prepared.
Of course. How how do we reach people? How do we get the research into the hands of the people that need it in a way that they can use it? Thank you. So what I will do is back up that question and say, before we do the research, we need to have practitioners on as reviewers, not just other academics.
We also have to co-create the research with the practitioners and the policymakers. Many of them are doing research, unfortunately ends up in the gray literature zone and doesn't get into academic journals. I do remember going to a global sustainable development conference and asking journal editors who are all sitting on a panel. How do you inform your journal themes?
Which practitioner organizations do you speak with? And none of them could name a practitioner Association that they speak with. And they said, I think maybe we need to do some efforts that way. We tend to talk to each other. We have to make that unacceptable. We have to make it unacceptable in how we get our research agendas.
Unacceptable from the funders point of views as to what kind of research we find unacceptable in terms of our tenure and promotion criteria and what we reward. So once we fix that side, right, then how do you get it out? And it's not like we have to fix one before we fix the other. Let's fix all of these at the same time. And that's what we're working on at the SDG publishers compact Fellows program.
So I'm putting into the chat right now. We have a series of action tips and I'm going to share my screen. So here are a bunch of action tips that people put many months into developing from lots of different publishers. And you can see that there's tips for publishers, editors, reviewers, authors, librarians, graduate students, researchers and practitioners.
We also have it not just for research, but we have it for educational materials, including a rubric for textbooks. We also have it for right here that answers to your question how do we communicate the results of our research out to policymakers, journalists, the public, and to professionals and practitioners? So if you just click on those, then it'll give you a variety of fairly easy to do steps that will help us fill this gap.
But, you know, we need to have a business model that will make that work and incentivizes it. And so if you want more information on all of this, we actually have an event coming up on April 5. And we're going to be talking about all of this. And more. You'll be able to network with publishers and with fellow researchers, and I'll put that in the chat as well.
I could talk more about the different parts of the business model that we see evolving, how I can help with that, but also we have to be cautious about how we use it. But I'll leave that for other questions. I feel like the incentive discussion could be its own webinar or it's its own conference. So Cara, maybe you can go next a little bit to talk about the work you do with knowable magazine. Sure well, noble, as I said before, is meant to reach general audience.
Ara, you're quiet. If there's a way to make it a little louder that without because I'm straight, I can do that. That's way better. Way better. Is that. Yes OK. OK Thank you so much. And sorry that that was an issue before.
Noble magazine creates its own science journalism. We have a lot of readers who reach us through the website itself, but many, many more millions more readers reach us through our publishing partners. You've probably read some of our material without being aware of it. It's appeared in The Washington post, the Atlantic, BBC, NPR. We're really proud that it's getting out there in different ways, and it's a global publication as well.
It's translated into a number of different languages. While back, we decided that we'd like to really lean into that to make sure that we are more of a global publication. We were thinking about, well, which language would represent the best opportunity for us? And this is where some complicated institutional decision making comes into play, right? Because it's not only the members of staff who have to think through this, you have to think about your funders.
How are you going to launch this, get the funding to launch it? How are you going to keep it sustainable? Of course, your stakeholders, the boards, the scientists with whom you work, they may have opinions as well, and you need to take all of those into consideration. What we ended up landing on was a Spanish language edition, noble in espanol, and that just launched this past November.
It's live now. Please do go check it out. We decided that we wanted to make it relevant not only for us Spanish speaking populations. And I should add that we did have an important data point. Spanish speaking populations in the Uc do prefer to consume scientific information in their native language. Now this is likely true of other native language speakers as well, but we did know that specifically about Spanish language audiences.
A lot of the journals that we're working with, though, are they do have their home in South America. We're looking for partners in Europe as well to really represent the diaspora more fully. Again, this is for general language audience. So the idea is you want to reach as many people as possible, right? We also do more tailored events for practitioners.
And in that case, as Debbie said, finding the right partner is really critical that you really want to have an organization that has the right credibility in those professional communities and also the right audience. So that you're getting your message in front of the right people, that they're there helping, crafting the questions, crafting the talking points are really true partners and not just participants throughout the entire event.
And when you think about impact in those terms, you're also thinking about very different scales. Having a highly effective event for practitioners could mean you're only reaching 30 people, whereas having a publication for a general audience, maybe you're striving for 30 million, right? So it really is coming into that decision making process with the right set of expectations and then identifying the right partners.
I agree. I agree. Your point about audience brings up a point that we talked about in our planning session, which is that a lot of communicating about research is really, really good marketing insights, knowing your audience, knowing what is going to be the kind of thing that you need to reach them. And you mentioned something when we talked earlier about target users and your app.
So if you could talk about that a little bit, that would be really interesting. Yeah, definitely. But if I could step back just for a minute and let me know if you can see my screen here. But I think before we talk about audience, I think we really need to get a better understanding of how much time people are spending on websites and reading stuff. And unfortunately and I'm not sure if people on the call might know this, but typically people only spend about 15 to 20 seconds on a website before they either decide to read something or just leave.
But this is the average time people spend on a web page. And I know from, you know, working with publishers and reading research papers, it takes a long time to read a research paper. But typically you're getting only about two minutes to possibly 3 minutes of the Articles of interest of somebody actually reading research on your site. And the behavior patterns have just pointed to less and less time being spent on reading research papers and understanding research papers.
And I know from my conversations with publishers, you know, they even say, like a vast majority of their traffic comes in from places like Google or Google Scholar. They grab that PDF and then off they go. So that the engagement numbers are really low. And, you know, what this really speaks to is that we need to a, understand the audience. We also need to understand how to communicate with that audience.
So while it may be great to publish thousands of open access papers a year or know, it's important that the gist of that paper is communicated to your audience. And so something something we learned at, you know, at research or life or through our app, our discovery was when we initially started, we were all gung ho on trying to get as many people to notice us and to download and use our app as possible.
And then when we started looking at engagement numbers and how sticky was our app or people actually coming back to use the app, we realized that a lot of people were downloading it, maybe using it for short term and then uninstalling it and not really engaging with the app long term, not providing us the user feedback we need it not giving us the ratings on the Store. So about a year ago, we kind of changed our approach and we said, OK, we're no longer going to look for numbers, we're going to look for quality.
And so we started creating personas for our audiences. We said, OK, who do we actually want to target with our marketing and advertising? Who do we actually want to tailor the app experience to? And so we identified that we wanted early career researchers, specifically in global South developing markets, people who didn't have access to funding or weren't able to pay $300 for a subscription to a journal for a year, or $40 to buy access to a journal to an article or who didn't even have a library to go to or who couldn't easily go to a library to access to database.
And so we started targeting those sorts of those sorts of researchers and students, and then we started building the app. So we started so we began to feature open access articles as the main experience on the home feed, and we made sure that open access articles were front and center. Then the next thing we did, and this speaks to just communicating better, is we started looking at, well, how do we help these users quickly understand what an article is about.
And then make a quick decision on what they want to spend the next 10 or 15 minutes reading. And so we started creating summaries and highlights of open access papers using artificial intelligence. And to date we've created about six, 6 million plus summaries that are available in the app using artificial intelligence. And we hope to create many, many more because there's about 40 million some plus open access articles.
We would love to create a highlight in summary for each and every one of those, but there are limitations. But we can talk about that another time. But, you know, but I think the key here is that you need to know your audience. You you need to target quality over quantity and you need to build an experience for your audience. Know, you can't just use a one size fits all approach. You're going to need to adapt.
You're going to need to adapt the way the article looks. You're going to need to use other tools like videos and plain language summaries, visuals as well as, you know, potentially use artificial intelligence to help readers get the gist of the content. Thank you. So one thing that seems like you're really into is with the stickiness is that trust, that that reliability and being able to come back to it and trust the information that's there.
But you have kind of a different take on this, which is about providing materials that make it very easy to communicate. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes Thank you. So I was mentioning to this team earlier when we were talking that I might have a bit of a case study to share. And that's one of the primary ways that I got here for this conversation today.
So I'm going to share my screen. And so what I wanted to walk through a little bit is we at 1,000 days were it was really important to us, not just to have research from the last two decades specific to low and middle income countries. But we just knew that the same challenges that families were having for that healthy time from pregnancy to the baby's second birthday were also happening to families right here in the United States.
So we worked with the American Journal of public health to produce a series about nutrition in the first 1,000 days. It was about 70 pages. 15 authors were super, super proud of it. But for today, some of the lessons that we learned, a couple of things. First of all, relevance, right? So when we did this, we didn't realize at the time, but we got super lucky the as we were preparing to publish the first White House conference on nutrition, hunger and health, the first one in more than 50 years was then scheduled for September.
We were supposed to publish in November. We were able to get permission to pre-release three of the articles the week and a half prior to the White House conference. So that allowed us to capture some of the excitement going on with the White House conference so that we could connect some of those dots, which made it even more relevant. And it allowed us to sort of create a moment where we could talk about it.
And then, of course, when we published another moment. So I think that relevance was important. We've talked a little bit about mediums. You'll see here, we use a press release, we did a tweet chat. But I want to especially share with you as Alexa shared this toolkit that we developed because we wanted to make it as turnkey as possible for as many partners as possible. So this I hope it looks fancy to you.
It's actually just an Adobe Spark. It's free, it's a paint by numbers sort of toolkit. But we were able to develop all this information so as the series media assets lived experiences. So let me just walk you through some of these. We built we made it turnkey, right? So social media here, we can just copy and paste takes you right there where you want to go. We built out a number of social graphics.
You just right click and download those that you could use. We built a newsletter copy, we hosted a tweet chat, and in the tweet chat we made available, for example, all the questions we were going to ask and pre-loaded some of the answers. So that was helpful promotion. Here's the newsletter copy. So I think what was helpful.
And as I was sharing this with Alexa and the team was that it's not enough to just say to colleagues and partners, oh, I hope you'll share this and amplify it, but to do everything you can in this turnkey environment. So that they can just capture it, copy, paste and go. And I mentioned something about newsletters when we were talking about that earlier in different mediums. What I found really interesting and I think this can expect a partnerships too, which was something Debbie and Cara talked about often.
The audience that you want. There may be an Association or something similar where they have a built in monthly newsletter and they're fine to use your content. So for us, it was a big win when, for example, the CDC has a monthly newsletter that they use and we asked if they would share this with their scientists and researchers, and they did. And so it was a big different audience for us, which was awesome.
And now that I have new colleagues in the publishing world, what I should have done was also share all this information with all of you, because it's just even more ways to reach these pockets academia and scientists. Policymakers same thing approaching the hill or using our existing newsletters. So all of that has been a helpful experience with us, for us.
And I hope it's given you a little ideas and some insights too, into ways that we found useful. Yeah, that really helps highlight how critical trusted networks and network development and trusted partners are in communicating science and real information. So thing that we also talked about. And I really thought was very important are what are some challenges you see coming?
Right so we've talked about some challenges that we have currently, how we've solved them, how we work through them. But we all know that this world is an ever changing place and the challenges will change. Are there any that you anticipate that we can start thinking about now? I'm going to start with you again, Debbie.
Did you predict to me? I'm sorry, Dr. j. Oh, Debbie. What are the challenges that we can anticipate? Yeah, I mean, you know, see the future if you can. Yeah so I've spent the last 42 years working on climate change. And the reason that in renewable energy technology and helping communities envision a sustainable future, not just from the environmental side, but also from the how do we build quality of life for all?
We have the potential to create thriving communities, even in a climate unstable world. But we need to. Envision and then prepare. So I have a little concern about this mindfulness stuff that's going on, all these people who are worried about the future. So then they're told to meditate and do yoga and do this other stuff that brings their awareness to the present.
And not worry about the future. And I agree we shouldn't worry about the future, but we should proactively problem solve. And if we're focusing on what are your sensations that you're feeling now and your breath, yeah, do it for a little part of the day to reduce your stress. But for goodness sakes, we all need to be futurists, number one, because it's fun. Number two, because it makes us much more effective human beings in the world.
And it really hurts my heart and my head when I see my girlfriend say, I can't watch the news. I have to stop watching. I have to go do my yoga class and just turn off for a while. And I'm thinking, you have such a brilliant brain and heart. We have so much work that can be done where we can make a difference right now. Engage so I think we need an education to train young people.
And of course, it should extend the lifelong learning to be change agents for the future, to be excited about what they can do to help create a more sustainable future. And you can look up my name and Google Scholar or wherever you guys want us to look it up, and you will find lots of articles I've written about how don't doom and gloom students with societal problems, engage them in solutions, let them practice being part of the solutions.
Let them do applied research. Even if they didn't do the research, they can apply it. Let them build partnerships with communities and listen first so they don't go in and say, I know what you need, but instead they hear what the communities need and they build those bridges and then build bridges to co creating future research. So they can practice being change agents while they're in school.
It can start in middle school, it can actually start in elementary school, but it definitely should be in high schools and in colleges. If I had a nickel for every master's student who's studying something about a societal issue, who tracks down my name and says, Deborah, I am so sick of writing papers that get graded and handed back and don't do anything to make the world a better place. I'm so sick of being stuck inside the Tower of academia.
In order to get the credentials I need, I want to do real world applied work. Now, can't my instructors and professors do that work? So I predict. That we will go into emergency mode from climate change and that people will, because they're in emergency mode, do even more of this mindfulness, not proactive problem solving as if they're mutually exclusive and they aren't.
Yeah, do your stress management, but engage in building a better future and engage your young people in building a better future. It will reduce mental illness. We also have to get a whole bunch of emotional intelligence skills in because this rumination that people do you all know that worrying and blame is a waste of time. Right?
I taught psychology for 30 years on top of teaching renewable energies because I realized as I was teaching renewables, that we have to give people emotional intelligence and coping skills or the answers just sit on the table. And I think it's just. In the future. If we don't connect academic research to practitioners, policymakers and the public, not only will we have a worse future for us all, but I think it puts higher Ed at great risk.
Lot of money. A lot of money is needed to support higher Ed. I'm not sure it will stay there because. Yep, Yep. I like what you said about that last part, the teaching kids about this. There's also a very funny Marc Maron skit about yoga. I don't know if you.
You said the same thing. I just thought that was funny. I'm going to I'm going to go on to Jay. You want to talk about what you see as future challenges. Yeah so I think, you know, to Debbie's point, I think one of the biggest challenges I see is disinformation. And, you know. You know, and I think.
Many people, I think all the people on this call will no doubt say that vaccines work or say that climate change is real. But out in the real world where the message doesn't reach the people or the wrong messengers are putting the wrong message out to people. You know, we still have an issue with 43% of people believing vaccines can cause autism, even though there's been so many studies that have said that's completely wrong.
Same thing, 53% still don't know that. Still don't believe that human activity is the main cause of climate change. And I mean, this is after how many billions of dollars and how many thousands and thousands of articles have been published? And, you know, technology has a huge part to play in this. I mean, you know, you can look at how fast fake news. mean, it's about six times faster on Twitter.
We know that fake news is prevalent on places like Facebook. It's prevalent on websites. And it you know, fake news is funded heavily by, you know, by digital advertising on websites. So, I mean, technology's definitely played a huge role in the spread of disinformation. But having said that, I do think that technology can help us fight disinformation.
And to Debbie's point about teaching young people, the one thing that, you know, really makes me happy to read and I enjoy reading this as an adult, but also I think more kids should read. This is frontiers for young minds. I mean, it's a publication where kids are editors and reviewers of research and they help write research.
They help write these little articles that communicate the research to young to young people. And I mean, things like these, things like this is what we need. We need more things like this to help communicate research, not just to young people, but to folks who may only have a high school degree, folks who may never have completed high school, because there are many, many people around the world and even in the US who still struggle to connect, connect, research to their daily lives.
So, yeah, I do. While I think technology does help the spread of disinformation, I do think publishers and funders and know policymakers can use it to help fight disinformation. And some of the ways that we can do it are by using other methods of communications like infographics or visual abstracts, video, as well as plain language summaries. And and you know, there's a really great survey from theme they've been doing for about five years.
But what they found was people want scientists to communicate in plain language. They want scientists to be able to make their research understandable to them. They don't want to you know, they don't want to sit there for half an hour trying to figure out what the research paper is about. They want to know what the research paper is about in 2 minutes.
And that's where we need to go as a know, as an industry is to communicate in simple terms, stop using jargon and really put our message where the people are not force them to come to where you are. Yeah Yeah. I mean, there's a really interesting point. There's two really interesting points to be made. One is through the sort of different modalities and literacies, thinking about the sort of scale of diversity, of literacy and interactions with these modalities.
And then there's that. Another really interesting point that was with scientists, this is their life's work. And people want to know, how does your work help me? How does it help me? And so and that part of the paper is going to be just a really, really short piece. And then both Blythe and Kara had some really interesting points to say about this.
And let's start with you, if you don't mind. Gosh, you're trying to say that. But, you know, that was sort of what I wanted to share was just that I have been so fortunate to work with researchers and scientists in my previous life, and I worked at The Nature Conservancy. I've worked at here at 1,000 days to solutions, people who are just incredibly brilliant.
And to your point about publishing their life's work, you know, I think about the work that we do with policymakers and how these congressional leaders here in the capitol, every 30 minutes, they're dealing with a completely different issue. And to be able to work with somebody and I don't even want to say humble, it's just it's got to be feel horrible to have someone say, here's your life's work.
20 seconds. That's all he's giving you, right? Or do it in a picture. That's all you get. Right so I acknowledge that. I want you to hear that. But at the same time, gosh, you know, I've always hated it when people say, like, dumb it down, what I think is better is meet them where they are.
Put yourself in their shoes and realize you've got seconds to grab their attention. I think Jay was sharing that earlier as well. How much time do you have? And and that's OK, let's embrace it and maybe breadcrumb them a little bit, like share enough of the biggest with a little information and then bring them along. So I hope that's relevant. Alexa I feel like ultimately I just really sympathize with, but I also feel like the benefit when that happens is the ultimate outcome of either these researchers get more funding from donors.
They're presenting to or a policy is truly re-evaluated and changed because of the data provided. So there's a real big opportunity at the other end of this, but I really do sympathize with having to really meet your audience where they are. Oh, of course. I mean, I think the critical thing here is that meeting people where they are means that your work can be impactful.
And so framing it in such a way that we can tell researchers this, this is how you really make a difference. And we know that you want to make a difference. Right? we know that researchers, scientists, they don't do this for abstract reasons. Right there are real reasons why they're interested in the work that they do. How can they? Meet people where they are.
So that they are actually changing lives and changing the world. Kara, I want to finish with you. Sure Thanks. So since the 1930s, annual reviews has been doing reviews, which means we have almost 100 years of synthesizing information, but we're synthesizing that information largely for the research community.
It's only been in the past five years or so, that we've attempted to do that for other audiences. And if you hand a review article to, say, a policymaker or maybe someone on their staff, even someone who has a background in the sciences that's 30 or 40 pages of very dense information that they need to get through to get the cogent points. So we've been trying to narrow it down, and we had created a couple of briefings, 3 to four pages.
We took those on a test run at the federal level mostly, and everyone still said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, that's way too much. That's really way too much. And what we've been hearing and this is from people across professional spectrums, which I think is really interesting, from policymakers to educators and practitioners, everyone in between, there is a huge unmet demand for scientific illustrations, infographics, graphic design.
If if you have the capacity to grow your science communication staff, adding individuals with that skill set, I think is really critical when it comes to boiling this information down to non research audiences. We just happen to hire a number a few years back just to improve the journals. And I think that happy accident has really led us to more rapidly create materials for these other audiences.
If we didn't already had that staff, that skill set in place, we'd be way behind where we are right now. One final point, because we have mentioned policymakers quite a bit when we first started looking into how can we help that community understand the promotion better, we weren't thinking at the federal level. But listen, a lot of decisions get made by your neighbors who might be on the school board, who might be is in municipal government.
There's a lot of decision making that has to happen as a local, municipal and regional level, and they frequently don't have the same sort of infrastructures and systems supporting their more technical decision making. And so I encourage you to reach out through your local communities. Again, I think all politics is local that has a certain amount of truth in it, and I think we can all make a real impact there.
So we've got just a few more minutes, and I'm going to ask the surprise question of the panelists that we didn't ask in our planning session, but what is your favorite way to consume information? I will go because I'm really glad you asked. I love I love podcasts.
I love podcasts. And we haven't talked about that at all. We do have a podcast. At annual reviews, we're quite proud of it. It's in its second season. But what we're hearing from people, even our. Even our researchers who have been around for decades and decades, they like to listen to information, maybe not even a podcast, but they just want it read aloud.
So that they consume it while they're doing different things in the car, doing laundry, whatever. That's why I like it. Yeah Yeah. Makes things so much more convenient and in some ways, more. More equitable. It's not even just a convenience thing for me. It's that when I'm not trying to focus on something, I'm so much better at learning.
Like if I listen to a podcast and I go garden, I'm going to retain so much more of it anyway. Someone else, someone else. You know how I said how your Education's at risk. And I really do believe that it is because for a lot of young people, when they want to go learn how to do something, where do they go? They go to YouTube.
That's where they go. You know, you ask young people who've done something, how did you figure out how to do this? They'll either say, I just googled it and they'll say to their parents and their other older relatives, just Google it like over and over and over again, right? Until finally they do. And they oh, that's where the instructions are.
But then they'll also say, oh, I just I just youtubed it. So we got to look at that. When I want to turn my brain off. OK I will go to TikTok y TikTok because I know that young people are there. And so I need to understand it better. Really learning a lot about the different personas and how it can affect their worldview. Because I'm interested in shifting people's worldviews out of a disinformation worldview like climate change as a hoax.
To sustainable Futures. Really accurate pictures of who we can, what we can create and our role in it. But I also find that when I'm done playing around with TikTok that I need to listen to green noise or something that will literally calm that brain down so then I can go to sleep. I also enjoy podcasts, but where do I get my information from? I don't just get information every single time I'm collecting information, it's connected to an action.
And an action that will scale up impacts. Because my biggest disappointment with the human species is that we tend to sit around an armchair, pontificate too much and not take action enough. And that's because people don't have a self concept of the kinds of very impactful actions they can take beyond just individual lifestyles. So anything related to how to help people see themselves as change agents and they can go call people they don't even know and say, you need to be doing this and I'm here to help you do it and to take any job and turn it into a green and sustainability job.
Those kinds of materials I'm particularly interested in, in whatever format they come in, but I'm always looking to connect. If I wasn't a speaker on this webinar, I would have been all over the chat sharing resources anyway, giving out my email, connecting to people and saying, connect with me because it's about actually implementing the solutions. And that makes me so happy.
When I'm part of implementing solutions. I don't have to spend time sitting around, sitting around and worrying. Awesome and I just want to say this to Blythe. My mother's life's work was about your work, and I'm just so appreciative of what you're doing. So thank you. I met Blythe and go really, really quickly and then I want to open it up for questions.
Yeah Thank you, Debbie. That was awesome to. You know, it's so different in my personal versus work life. So in my work life, I try and I like to watch video. I like to watch the news, just the traditional news. So and I forced myself to watch two very different systems. So I'll watch CNN or MSNBC sometimes. And then if I do that a couple of days, I have to turn on Fox for a day or two because I just don't feel that we're in a place anymore where we can learn our news from one place, and that includes Twitter, Facebook, et cetera but from my personal life, I'm Gen X old school, so I'm all about Facebook.
I sort of grew up there. And I love to show pictures of my kids to their grandparents on Facebook. So that's one of my favorite things for me. For me, I love podcasts and YouTube. I mean, I've used YouTube quite a bit to figure out how to fix something or how to build something. So yeah, and definitely I enjoy Twitter sometimes, sometimes just to go on there to watch the fights, but most times 2 to find new research and keep up with the news.
But yeah, it's yeah, I mean, there's just, there's just way too many channels. So again, I think it goes back to know your audience and figure out where they are and connect with them there. I love it when Twitter gets spicy. I don't contribute because I don't like to be spicy, but I like the spiciness from other people. Are there any questions? Please leave them in the Q&A chat and we will.
Our panelists will. We'll tackle them. Comments are fine to. While they're putting that in place, can you put it into the chat that link you had to the website that has all of these social media to Bookshare and making it easy for others?
So also, if you see if you want to see a group taking advantage of all those different social media, we have a youth sector team of the Uc partnership for education for sustainable development. Just go to change the chamber org and check out all of their using all of those mediums. Awesome awesome. We do have a question.
So the, the first question is very excited about all this, thinking about what to do first. How do how do you get started? Yeah I mean, I think that's I think that's a hard question because there's so many things that you could be doing. But I think one of the first things to do is maybe have a look at how you're publishing content and how your readers are coming in to engage with that content.
Know, I think that's really important. And and, you know, and when you go on the SDG publisher side, there's the whole thing about how to simplify communication. Of your research. And I think what's really important is also find a way to help authors communicate their message quickly and clearly. So like, why should I care that you did this research? So I think that's a good place to start.
If I can actually add to that. I think researching your researchers is a really good place to start. Ask your researchers what they want to change, because if you can get to their intrinsic motivation for the work they do, you're going to have a better sense of who they want to reach. Yeah I'm not sure I'd leave it to just the researchers because it's amazing how close minded some of the vision is of the researchers.
I would go to the I would do that for sure, Alexa, but I would also go to the tips. Go to the tips on the SDG compact Fellows page. We've spent months thinking about the answer to that question. Given who you are when you're introduction, you definitely could be using multiple ones. And please don't do just one thing, do multiple things simultaneously, because that's the pace of change we need for the system shifting.
And you're in a position to help do it. Thank you. Thank you, Debbie. was just about to say this is a heavy lift, right? This is going to require all hands on deck. And we all want to make the largest impact we possibly can. But any impact is going to be great, I think. Get started, look for something to piggyback on if you can. We love to have events that combine practitioners and researchers and we're always looking for people.
I know there are other organizations, too. We need volunteers to just help present their viewpoints. So that might be a good initial one and see where the demands are, who's looking for people and test the waters a little bit with using someone else's platform. Yeah just to sort of sum up a lot of what I heard, I think for me. When in doubt, start with your audience at the end of the day, like I think Debbie Cara, we all sort of hit on this.
Who are you? Who do you really want to communicate with and how do they get their information? I like to tease my friends that marketing is quite easy because the root word marketing is market. So people will tell you where they are. And what they need. And I would start with your audience.
Great I actually have a question. If there are no more, I will wait like 20, 30 more seconds to see if there are any more questions. But yeah, can I just add one other thing? Your audience isn't just your researchers. Your audience is the public. Your audience is the policy makers and the practitioners. So don't just talk to your researchers and bring to them the possibilities of what you could be doing and then say, what would interest you about that?
Because if you just ask them, what are you interested in, they may not get that bigger vision that you have gotten today. So then you find the motivational buttons and I could make a list for you of the motivational buttons, but I'm not sure we have time. So there is a question. Do you have examples of academic societies who are doing exceptional jobs at converting research into effective messaging for public stakeholders?
Before I open this up, I actually do have a good example. There's an organization in Sweden called Swiss vine, and it's a collection of spinal surgeons that are writing summaries most of the published research that is happening at that time. And every patient that goes to a spinal consultation in Sweden is added to the database and they get access to this information and there and they get emails about when there are summaries that are posted.
So every patient that interacts with the Swedish spinal doctor gets that information anyway. So somebody else can come, can go. If you go if you go to that top tips page on the SDG publishers compact Fellows, you look at the last two lists how to connect to practitioners, policy makers, how to connect to others. There are examples embedded within the top tips. But yeah, I think we should put together a more comprehensive list because we have it.
We just haven't published it out there. It's an emerging international trend, that's for sure. Good you've got 1 minute. Well, it was a hard question. AJ put an answer on the chat to ask. He's been great. Awesome well, I think that's probably it then. Unless there are any last minute questions that we can answer very briefly, or if you want to ask it on Twitter or on email.
I think all of us would be happy to engage any of those platforms. So Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate you being here. And if Melanie or JSON has any last thoughts. OK well, Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, all.
Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everybody, for attending today's webinar. Thank you. To our panelists. And of course, Thank you to our education sponsors. Mauricio silver, silverchair, 67 bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000. You will attendees, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email.
We encourage you to provide feedback to help us pick topics for future events, and please check the cesp website for information on upcoming events, including the 45th annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. This concludes our session today. Thanks a lot.