What is science communication?

Science communication is often understood as the work of explaining science to people outside science—through journalism, education, public outreach, policy communication, and other forms of engagement. All of this is science communication. But it is only part of the field.

Science communication also includes the enormous amount of communication that makes science itself possible: researchers sharing findings and data, collaborating across disciplines, publishing and reviewing research, deciding what questions to study, communicating evidence to policymakers, transferring discoveries into practice, and building the relationships and systems through which knowledge moves.

The field therefore extends far beyond writing, media, or public understanding. At SCI, we find it useful to think about science communication as serving three broad and overlapping functions:

1. Understanding — helping people understand science. This includes science writing and journalism, education, public engagement, visualization, media relations, policy communication, and the many other ways scientific ideas and evidence are explained to different audiences.
2. Discovery — helping science communicate internally. This includes scholarly publishing, data sharing, research collaboration, informatics, peer review, interdisciplinary communication, conferences, study design, technology transfer, and the many other systems researchers use to exchange information and build on one another’s work.
3. Coordination — helping people and institutions act on knowledge together. Many scientific challenges cross disciplinary, institutional, sectoral, and national boundaries. Addressing them requires more than communicating facts. It requires creating shared understanding, connecting expertise, reconciling different perspectives and priorities, developing common frameworks, and sustaining cooperation among people who may otherwise have little opportunity or incentive to work together.

This third dimension has become increasingly important to SCI’s work. The Open Scholarship Initiative brought researchers, universities, publishers, funders, libraries, governments, and other stakeholders together to work on the future of scholarly communication. CDRANet connects experts across countries and sectors around the challenge of large-scale carbon dioxide removal. The Vancouver Process extends this model into government-to-government communication and cooperation. Our work on disinformation similarly asks how different communities can combine their knowledge and capabilities to confront a problem none can solve alone.

Seen this way, science communication is not simply the transmission of scientific information. It is part of the connective infrastructure of science itself—the systems, relationships, and processes that allow knowledge to move, people to collaborate, institutions to coordinate, and science to contribute more effectively to solving difficult problems.