One Scientist’s Attempt to Create a New Science Communication Platform

As someone who writes about science communication, I’m always interested in experiments designed to help people share information about research and research findings. Sometimes they are formal studies designed by science communication scholars, and sometimes they’re efforts by scientists, reporters or professional communicators to try something new and see how it works.

I work at NC State University, and in late 2015 met a postdoctoral researcher at NC State named Kamy Singer. His research focused on plant and microbial biology, but he was also the creator of a web platform called SPapers that aims to help researchers share their work more effectively.

Publishers Respond to NSF Public Access Plan

On March 18, the U.S. National Science Foundation announced the steps it will take to make federally-funded research publicly available. I had some questions regarding what this might mean for publishing companies and peer-reviewed journals.

News Brief: NSF Unveils Plan for Public Access to NSF-Funded Research

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) unveiled a plan March 18 that would require researchers to make publications pertaining to NSF-funded research freely and publicly available within 12 months of their initial publication. The requirement will apply to all projects whose proposals are submitted after the agency issues its Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide in January 2016.

A Journal to Advance Citizen Science: an Interview with Caren Cooper

Crop of a photo of the Cascade Butterfly Project, Mt. Rainier National Park. Photo credit: Kevin Bacher. Click for details.

Science communication and citizen science have a lot in common – namely, the desire to engage with people both inside and outside of the traditional science community. But where science communication is often seeking only to educate or to get folks interested in science, citizen science is trying to get people actively involved in the scientific process.

Science Blogging and Citations

Photo credit: North Carolina State University

Paige Brown Jarreau, author of the SciLogs blog From The Lab Bench, recently wrote a lengthy post on the science of science blogging. The post included a lengthy list of related journal articles, and one of them caught my eye: “Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations?” With Paige’s blessing, I decided to unpack that particular paper a bit.

Scicomm Accessibility: Accessing Scicomm Journals

Photo credit: Nevit Dilmen, via Wikimedia Commons

Science communication researchers aren’t the only people interested in science communication research. Reporters, bloggers and researchers from various fields interested in sharing their work (among others) are interested in learning what “scicomm” can tell us about conveying scientific information to various audiences. But reaching the relevant research findings can be difficult.

Citation Rates Highlight Uphill Battle for Women in Research Careers

Photo by George Joch, courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory.

One of the most important and institutionalized forms of science communication is the peer-reviewed journal article. These articles are essential to disseminating information among researchers in specific fields of study, and the extent to which those journal articles are cited by researchers in later articles is of enormous professional importance to researchers – particularly researchers who work in academic settings. But it appears that many researchers face an uphill battle when it comes to getting citations and related professional benefits. Specifically, researchers who are women.

Peer Review Quality is Independent of Open Access

(Image: North Carolina State University)

Editor’s Note: A new report from the journal Science indicates that there are serious problems with the peer-review process at many open access journals. However, the issue may not be as clear as the article suggests. To get a different perspective, I solicited this guest post from Jon Tennant, an open access advocate and Ph.D. student at Imperial College London. Jon also blogs at Green Tea and Velociraptors and is one of the folks behind the Palaeocast podcast series. I’ll let Jon take it from here.

U.S. Shutdown Beginning to Affect Journals

Image: Kathrin Tausch

Peer-reviewed journals have long been at the heart of science communication – and now they’re beginning to feel the pinch of the U.S. government’s partial shutdown.